Toward Zoopoetics: Rethinking Whitman's "Original Energy"

Literary Autozoographies: Contextualizing Species Life in German Animal Autobiography

“…It appears that reading literary autozoographies as 'real' renditions of an animal's thoughts and feelings, or finding some accounts more 'realistic' than others, means finding oneself entrapped by a cognitive illusion ( [13], p. 488). 21 There is no such thing as knowing animal (and, admittedly, also human) minds and feelings, nor is there any chance to evade anthropomorphizing animals, if they are made narrating (or even writing) 22 subjects of their lives, be it in German, English or, in fact, any other language. Rendering animal consciousness and feelings in linguistic terms is always subject to an epistemological anthropocentrism ( [71]; see also ([72], p. 178)).…”

“…As a means to underscore the relation between animal narrator and animal protagonist as 'autobiographical truth', and in order to allow for the reader's empathy with the horses, experientiality in equine autozoographies is visible especially in those 20 See part four of this article for a discussion on the historical contexts in which these emotional and cognitive attributions became valid in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 21 Marco Caracciolo weighs Thomas Nagel's dictum of animal minds as inconceivable against J.M. Coetzee's Elisabeth Costello's contention of imagination as a means to transgress species boundaries, and finds Costello lacking the means of verifying her claims ( [13], p. 490).…”

Learned Fable, Living World: Artistry, Knowledge and Attention to Nature in Two Aesopic Paintings by Joannes Fyt

“…12 Zoopoetics seeks to deconstruct the opposition between the real and the imagined (or "literary") animal, showing how these are at once nonidentical and enmeshed in human thought. 13 Among the existing varieties of ecocriticism, zoopoetics is particularly pertinent for my discussion because of this nonbinary stance, which challenges the impulse to move past the "surface" of the fable image, concerned with material nature, in order to get at something else: a meaning, a moral, a story, or a cache of factual data. 14 In methodological terms, it also offers a sophisticated model of attentiveness that is helpful in clarifying how the works examined here move between "life" and the world of ideas.…”

“…14 In methodological terms, it also offers a sophisticated model of attentiveness that is helpful in clarifying how the works examined here move between "life" and the world of ideas. 15 Zoopoetic attentiveness is alert not only to the animal's appearance and other visible traits but also to how it inhabits and actively shapes its environment. 16 In addition, it is strongly attuned to embodiment-that of the animal and of the human subject.…”

“…As Moe has argued, "an attentive disposition precedes imitation"; from a zoopoetic perspective, skilled imitation is not an exceptional faculty restricted to the artist, but it instead originates in the sensitive, vigilant response to the world that all living creatures, whether human or animal, display. 39 Given that major themes of the fable as depicted in the Gallinero are the perception of value and the value of (visual) perceptiveness, it is thus significant that the work's composition contains points of interest that reward the experience of viewing it carefully. These include the glittering eye visible between the bars of the feed-box that reveals the presence of an additional black hen in the right-hand group (fig.…”