Animal Presence. A Conversation on Zoopoetics

In the past few decades, the concept of zoopoetics – originating in Jacques Derrida’s L’animal que donc je suis – has been developed as a description both of a type of literature and a way of reading literature that deals with the interplay between animality and language. In this panel, Forum Modernism invites literary scholars Kári Driscoll from Utrecht University and Amelie Björck from Södertörn University to discuss zoopoetics and the role of animality in modernist literature.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there is a shift in how animals appear in literature. In particular, they begin to resist the conventional symbolic and metaphorical meanings with which they have historically been associated. In the wake of Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche, the question of the boundary between human and animal becomes attached to ideas about language and speechlessness, making the animal, or animality, a subject that receives attention from poets and writers interested in or troubled by the limits of language.

Does thinking concerning the animal derive from poetry, as Derrida suggests? To what extent can (poetic) language represent the other? And what can the concept of zoopoetics offer literary scholars interested in both animal welfare and poetic figurations?

Programme

10:00 – 11:00 Panel discussion
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:15 – 12:00 Open discussion

The panel discussion is moderated by Sofia Roberg, postdoc at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University.

Registration

Please sign up for the symposium no later than 28 February:

Register here