Outside the Anthropological Machine

Chiara Mengozzi is a researcher at Charles University in Prague (Faculty of Arts), where she teaches literary theory, as well as Italian and French contemporary literatures. She is also Associated Researcher at CEFRES in Prague (French Research Center in Social Sciences). Her research focuses on animal studies, ecocriticism, climate fiction, postcolonial and migrant literatures, world literature, and translation and reception theory. She is the author of an Italian monograph entitled Narrazioni contese. Vent’anni di scritture italiane della migrazione (2013). She is currently investigating the relation between science and literature in the context of climate change.

Introduction

Ways Out of the Anthropological Machine, or How and Why to Defamiliarize Ourselves

Chiara Mengozzi

Part I

"Playing a Part in the Dramaturgy of the Real": (Hi)story on the Side of Animals

1. A Giraffe’s Journey to France (1826–1827): Recording the Encounter From the Animal’s Point of View

Éric Baratay

2. Structures of Captivity and Animal Agency: The London Zoo, ca. 1865 to the Present Times

Violette Pouillard

3. Atlantic History From the Saddle: The Role of Horses in the Slave-Trading Atlantic World

Rachael L. Pasierowska

4. Re-animalizing Animals, Re-animating Humans




Michał Krzykawski



5.

Laika’s Lullabies: Post-anthropocentric Representations of the First Dog in SpaceAnita Jarzyna

6. The Blind Spot of the Plot: Thinking Beyond Human With Karel Čapek

Chiara Mengozzi

Part II

"I Relate, Therefore I Am": Human-Animal Encounters

7. Animals and Their Keepers in Belle Époque Postcards of the Jardin des Plantes Menagerie

Maria P. Gindhart

8. "Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly"? Blurring the Boundary Between Humans and Animals

Quentin Montagne

9. Flesh, Fur, and Forgetting

Kari Weil

10. Animals as Monsters,Victims, and Models in the Age of Decadence

Eva Voldřichová Beránková

Part III

"Across the Narrow Abyss of Non-comprehension": Entering Animals’ Lives

11. Literature and Animal Expressiveness: On the Cognitive and Ethic Aspects of Zoopoetics

Anne Simon

12. "Une langue ou une musique inouïe, assez inhumaine…": Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal

Kári Driscoll

13. From Being a Beast to Becoming-Animal: Literary Experiments in Crossing the Species Divide

Jonathan Pollock

14. Cameras That Pose as Animals: Imagining Non-human Animals Through the POV Shot

Concepción Cortés Zulueta

15. Playing (With) the Non-human: The Animal Avatar in Bear Simulator

Michael Fuchs