Thesis Proposal
Many have argued that animal characters in children’s fables present animals as “absent referents,” or metaphors that are not meant to point to any authentic animal behavior or inform how we are to interact with animals. Critics of children’s literature often ignore the literal level of the story, subverting it to the allegorical. In her essay, “The Animal Voice Behind the Animal Fable,” Naama Harel calls for an alternative reading strategy. While many aspects of the animal protagonist in a fable can be mapped onto human experience, Harel argues that there is a “differential gap” that prevents us from completely reducing the nonhuman condition to the human condition. I would like to explore what is lost (or excluded) in that transition from the animal protagonist to its interpretation as allegory. How do the fables build and burn bridges of empathy, and does this insistence on an allegorical reading create or repress identification with the animal subject?
Much has been written about the role children’s literature plays in the formation of subjectivity. The structuring process of the child is dependent on repetition—repetition of particular books, repetition of images, repetition of narrative associations. Countless contemporary children’s books, including Andy Cutbill’s The Cow That Laid an Egg, Doreen Cronin’s Click Clack Moo, and Phyllis Root’s Kiss The Cow, reiterate the bovine image as an illustrated subject. My search through the archives of children’s texts will attempt to trace the origins of this symbol, which was noticeably absent in pre-1800 fables. Through my research, I will look for the patterns that developed in the period of children’s literature that coincided with the rise of factory farming, exploring how this new commodification of the animal subject affected its analogous two-dimensional representation.
I will take Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am as my primary critical object of study. Drawing on his experience of being seen naked by a cat, Derrida describes the infinite range of possibilities that open up when he is looked at through the gaze of the nonhuman. Derrida interweaves Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with his inquiry to describe how the animal has been turned into a “theorem, something seen and not seeing.” Derrida explores the issue of animal representation in terms of subject-formation saying, “the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abysmal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself.” Although Alice in Wonderland does not take farm animals as its primary focus, I consider it fundamental to my theoretical analysis as its absurd rendering of anthropomorphized animals speaks to the tradition of fables that use this strategy without apparent conflict. The (il)logic model of Alice in Wonderland, which Derrida draws heavily from, will come into my theoretical discussion.
My method of reading will focus just as much on the graphic as on the textual components of the literature. The two-dimensional illustrations of animals in children’s books—among them Hilaire Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902), and Marjorie Flack’s The Story about Ping (1933)—thrive on essentialist portrayals. Foxes eat rabbits, because it is essential to their character. Geese are maternal. Cows, regardless of gender, have enlarged milk-filled udders. The spaces of the illustrations often lack gradation and are filled with primary colors. These uncultivated character icons allow the viewer to experience the bare minimum of representation. While some may argue that these primitive, stagnant symbols correspond with an unsophisticated method of thinking, I will examine how these images actually create the space for a new type of critical inquiry, one that is not reliant upon adornment and artifice.
Hieroglyphic History: The Semiotics of Inglourious Basterds and the Suturing Work of Laughter
Spring Junior Independent Work
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud examines smut, a species of tendentious jokes composed of obscene material. He argues that these sexually-charged jokes derive their pleasure from the aggression that emerges with repression. When such a joke is experienced, Freud says, three people are involved: the deliverer of the joke, the object against whom the joke is directed, and the inactive listener. Freud argues that sexually-explicit smut takes women as its object and is a response to sexual inhibition. Through the joke-telling process, the object of the joke is exposed (or controlled) and the listener is able to experience a form of the inhibited pleasure. Freud’s analysis of jokes positions them as moments of aggression that take their cathexis in the listener. He says, “A person who laughs at smut he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression.”
I will analyze Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Inglourious Basterds, alongside Freud’s argument about the aggressive nature of jokes. Tarantino has established himself as a director who allows smut to flourish within the esteemed ranks of art house critics. His representations of violence are innovative in the way he seamlessly blends humor with material that is markedly unfunny. Tarantino uses several techniques to instill jest in the most traumatizing of moments: superimposed and absurd typefaces, two-dimensionally hyperbolic sequences of severed limbs, discordant dialogue, etc. Playing on the term “torture porn,” actor Eli Roth has described Inglourious Basterds as “kosher porn,” constructing a subtle argument about the movie as a moment of Jewish catharsis. Indeed, Tarantino’s technique assumes a certain pleasure-inducing effect of violence against the Nazi characters of the film. Tarantino’s unique concoction of humor and violence produces a particular type of spectator, one that manifests himself in the scene of the burning cinema.
Tarantino employs a certain framing technique during the scene of the burning cinema in Inglourious Basterds. The camera situates itself behind the eye of the projectionist, watching a film through several mediators of experience: the screen of our theater, the film of Tarantino’s camera, the window of the projectionist, the screen of the theater within the film, etc. This obsession with framing eventually places the camera in the seat next to a moviegoer, blurring the boundaries between spectacle and spectator. The viewer is forced to see certain similarities between her surroundings and the image on the screen. The scene of the burning cinema precedes a conversation between two characters, during which a female character rejects the sexual advances of a war hero. In an uncharacteristic gesture, the soldier uses physical assertion as a response to this rejection. In this moment of aggression, the violence of the character is paralleled in the violent comedy of Nation’s Pride (the film within the film).
In Tarantino’s theater, spectatorship is an active process of aggression, as the cinema is a site that both projects and produces desires. I will look at Tarantino’s scene of the burning cinema to examine the role of theater spaces in this production and actualization of repressive forces.
Beloved Beasts: Resurrecting Toni Morrison’s Invisible Animals
Fall Junior Independent Work
My junior paper will trace bestiality (broadly defined) through works of Toni Morrison, most notably Beloved. It will deal with both the literal instances of bestiality (e.g. the men of Sweet Home were “taken to calves”) as well as the figurative instances (e.g. Nel remarks that Sula and her husband were having sex “like dogs”). In positioning these varying conceptions and depictions of animals, I will try to discover how the animal is portrayed both as a trope and as a subject, at once backgrounded and foregrounded. The project of this paper will be to unravel how animals emerge as the hidden, underrepresented subjects of Morrison novels, whose primary function is often to spotlight the underrepresented.
While my paper may take up animal representation more broadly, I would like to limit it to instances of bestiality because of the cultural significance of sexual acts. The historical literature on bestiality indicates that these acts were often punished severely, out of fear that they left traces of the animal in the human and the human in the animal. The term bestiality connotes the unruly qualities of the “beast,” which include irrationality, savagery and hypersexuality, signaling that very attempt to define the sexed subject as a brutal, depraved animal. Conversely, the “beast” in Morrison novels often emerges as a metaphor for evil as the oversexed man who cheats on his wife is bestial. The beast is at once meant to indicate inferiority as well as some threatening force of power.
My intent, however, is not merely to read Beloved through the lens of speciesism. Rather, I would like to explore how Morrison deliberately renders animals invisible, an attempt, perhaps, to clue readers to the way forms of exploitation become normalized. My primary point of analysis will posit a parallel between the Sweet Home calves and the slave women on the ships of the Middle Passages. Morrison positions both groups in similar syntactical structures, aligning the two in some motivated way. Are these analogies meant to depict the denigration of the slave women to the status of the beast, or a subtle analogous oppression of the beast?
The equation of slaves to animals is a historically significant and culturally-sensitive one. While the comparison was deployed as a tool to justify oppression during slavery (i.e. if a group could be shown to be bestial enough, then their oppression was justified), fears of that reasoning has left the comparison off-limits, leaving unquestioned the assumption that there is an appropriate way to deal with things that are bestial and inhuman. I want to explore what is at stake in this comparison of humans to animals, and in these acts that threaten the boundary between human and animal.
