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Kafka's Zoopoetics - Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier (Hardcover)
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Kafka's Zoopoetics - Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier (Hardcover)
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Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from
his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their
prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka's animal representations
have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of
intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka's
animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka's commentators and
politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique,
however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an
interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna.
Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within
Kafka's entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with
both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka's Zoopoetics
critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very
human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka.
Kafka's animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity
and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among
his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in
"The Metamorphosis"), an ape turned into a human being (in "A
Report to an Academy"), talking jackals (in "Jackals and Arabs"), a
philosophical dog (in "Researches of a Dog"), a contemplative
mole-like creature (in "The Burrow"), and indiscernible beings (in
"Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People"). Depicting species
boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid
human-animal space, which can be described as "humanimal." The
constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark
barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the
anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in
humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding
them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this
barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and
animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within
posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which
is simultaneously both imagined and very real.
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