CHRISTY HEFLIN

The Authenticities of the Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse

The images of Eileen Agar’s Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse have a range of dates spanning from the late 1930s to 1995, when it arrived in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection. In each of these images, however, the hat never looks the same. The hat’s life, very much like that of the artist’s, evolved over time. I argue that even though this inverted cork basket adorned with both natural and manmade décor features different elements in each photograph, it remains the same work of art; retaining what is essential, what Benjamin calls its aura. Its identity and authority remain intact.

BIO

Christy Heflin is a Paris-based PhD researcher working on Surrealism and marine life at Royal
Holloway University of London. She completed her master’s degree in photographic
conservation research at Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and holds a Bachelor of Arts from
Louisiana State University where she researched the early twentieth-century art residence,
La Ruche.

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CAROLINE HOVANEC
In Defense of Pigeons
Marianne Moore’s 1935 poem “Pigeons” captures the contradictory nature of this most beloved and most hated of birds. “Older than the ancient Greeks” yet with “a surprising modernness”; “[m]igrating always” yet attached to its home; thriving in most places yet with particular species endangered or extinct—the pigeon is a bird with a thousand faces. Moore’s ode to the Columbidae praises the birds’ beauty and marvelous homing abilities, but not everyone felt the same way. The 1930s, as Colin Jerolmack has documented, is the decade in which the pigeon’s reputation as a dirty nuisance animal emerged, especially in cities like New York and London. During World War II, Britain awarded several carrier pigeons the Dickin Medal for their service as messengers, but by the 1950s wild pigeons were largely seen as carriers only of dirt and disease. They came to be stigmatized alongside the poor immigrant city dwellers who fed and sometimes bred them. In 1966, a parks commissioner coined the epithet that has dogged the birds ever since: “rats with wings.”
In this talk I want to briefly survey the role of the pigeon in twentieth-century literature, homing in on Moore’s poem but also flitting over Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Pigeons” (1970), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Literary pigeons are metonymies for many themes we associate with modernist culture: urban life, cosmopolitanism, anti-imperialism, mobility, global networks of circulation, and the precarity of nonhuman life under a capitalist regime of growth. Today, we understand ourselves to be living in the Anthropocene. Pigeon virtues—adaptability, resilience, a strong sense of home—might help us think about how to live better with human and nonhuman others in this rapidly changing world.

BIO

Caroline Hovanec is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. Her recent book Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) identifies a new understanding of animal subjectivity in literary and scientific writings of the early twentieth century. Currently she is working on a book project entitled “Detestable Creatures,” which examines the rhetoric and aesthetics of vermin in modernist and contemporary world literature.

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RORY HUTCHINGS
Troubling the Boundary: Imagining the Nonhuman in Ulysses
Joyce’s Dublin is perhaps one of the greatest evocations of a multispecies landscape
within the city. Joyce not only deeply engages with the ubiquity of nonhumans, their
products and their lives within the metropolis, but also their relationship to histories of
the Irish famine and colonialism. Through descriptions of nonhuman suffering, Joyce
creates a compelling creaturely awareness which reflects not only the condition of
animals in 20 th  Century Ireland but also the state of the nation. The ghostly, tortured
bodies of beasts remind us of the lethal treatment of Ireland’s people.
And yet, this description of Joyce’s nonhuman is perhaps reductive
considering his complex construction of a nonhuman imaginary within the text.
Animals in Ulysses are not simply the symbols of a traumatised nation. Indeed, a far
more nuanced and densely crafted account of Dublin’s nonhuman population is
offered as we are invited to gaze into and through the eyes of the animal. The forays
the novel offers into animal experience are not simply an imaginative exercise in
“experiencing” the animal. Indeed, this analysis will argue that they constitute an
ethical engagement with the nonhuman, ultimately troubling the boundary between
human and animal.   
Proceeding from the works of theorists including David Rando, Peter Adkins,
JM Coetzee and Carol J. Adams, this paper will explore Joyce’s troubling of the
human-nonhuman boundary with a view to ascertaining how a Joycean ethics of the
animal can be identified in Ulysses and, furthermore, how we read these in the
current climate of nonhuman studies and the “animal turn”.

BIO

Rory Hutchings obtained both his BA and MA in English and Literary Studies respectively at Goldsmiths, University of London. His academic interests centre around trans-Atlantic Modernism, animal studies, regional modernisms in the works of Beckett, Woolf and the "Sussex modernists" and critical ecologies in contemporary American literature.

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GABRIELA JARZĘBOWSKA
Pest Control as Modernisation: Anti-rat Stalinist Propaganda in Poland
In my talk I present a rhetorical analysis of rat control programs in Stalinist Poland as an
example of the entanglements between the biological and the political within the
modernization discourse. I analyze how dominant political narratives influenced pest control
and sanitary programs and how the biological shaped, challenged or hindered political
modernization projects.
As I am to demonstrate, most early postwar anti-rat materials symbolically deprived these
rodents of their animality by attributing to them human features and present in a figure of
an enemy. Although an intensification of rat control campaign in the turn of 1950s can be
explained by their population's sharp increase during the war period, the convergence of the
anti-rat propaganda with political purges at the same time, as well as strategic and rhetorical
resemblances between these two operations, do not seem coincidental. As creatures posing
considerable threat both to public health (vectors of disease) and national economy (‘crafty
thieves') rats can be perceived as embodiments of challenges to be confronted by the Polish state devastated during the war. Propaganda materials from Stalinist times explicitly
emphasize the presence of rat populations in neglected areas as a touchstone of
backwardness and underdevelopment, making rats (or rather, their absence) a gauge of
modernization processes. I argue that the dynamics of post-war rat control programs can be
examined as a constant struggle between human and non-human (or, the cultural and the
biological) in pursuit of modernist ‘purification’ (Latour, 1993) and as such can cast new light on modernization and sanitation processes in Poland.

BIO

Gabriela Jarzębowska is a PhD candidate at the faculty of Artes Liberales, University of
Warsaw and a Fulbright Fellow at the Wesleyan University (supervisor: Kari Weil) as well as
National Science Centre's (NCN) grantee. In 2016 she developed her research project as a
Junior Visiting Scholar at the Seedbox Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities
Collaboratory based at the Linköping University, Sweden (supervisor: Cecilia Ǻsberg). She
works on human-animal studies, critical animal studies and environmental humanities,
focusing mostly on relations between human and non-human others that are perceived as
problematic and/or undesirable. In her PhD thesis entitled "Species Cleansing. Rat
Eradication as a Cultural Practice" (supervisors: Ewa Domańska, Andrzej Elżanowski) she
examines material, linguistic and visual practices shaping our perception of urban rats, in

order to analyze cultural codes which organize, strengthen and sustain symbolic status and
negative stereotypes of this species. She believes that in the context of global environmental
crisis, the humanities must take a stand and develop new methods of analysis aimed at
rethinking humans' place in the world, as well as propose theoretical models for constructive
solutions to bring about change.

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ARIEL KLINE
The Minotaur and Modern Empire
George Frederic Watts’s Minotaur (1885) differs from the many versions of Pablo
Picasso’s. In the eyes of its contemporary critics, Watts had painted a polemic against the
“Maiden Tributes” of London—child prostitution that caused an outcry that year. The painting,
then, is a paragon of Victorian visual didacticism. A beastly creature awaits its sacrifices from
Athens, a city subjugated by Crete and forced to send its children to the Minotaur in his
labrinyth. An 1887 viewer of Watts’s painting called it a “brutal, cruel, and irresponsible power,
an embodied Force without pity,” citing the “cold stare of his ravenous eye.” A later writer tells
of the creature’s “savage eyes” and “hungry mouth,” and another identifies its mostly English
viewers as Theseus, who might wish to slay the creature in the name of “High Greek
civilization.”
And yet Watts’s creature is no evil monster, but a sad beast who casts a pensive glance
across a hazy sea. There is a silence embedded in this difference between the painting and its
reception. This silence, I argue, holds the weight of the British Empire. In this paper, I compare
the Minotaur to the ambivalent descriptions of John Bull in nineteenth-century Britain. John
Bull—the symbol of England—was the imperial villain of the Tasmanian poet John Lewin’s The
Minotaur! (1849), and made an appearance in Percy Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) as a
Minotaur hybrid, an engine of the state. These and other examples critique empire from within. I
wonder, then, what is gained from envisioning a silently pathetic empire at its center, wrought in
bestiality and shame. This is an empire of inheritance and invisible violence, one that embodies
the terms of Derrida’s Beast and Sovereign. Victorian artists like Watts are bracketed out of
modernist art histories. In this paper, then, I situate Watts in a modernity of beastly politics,
towards what T.J. Clark has called the accidental “contingency” of modern painting. It is less an
insular story of 1880s London, and more a picture in proleptic dialogue with Picasso’s modern
beasts.

BIO

Ariel Kline is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.
She is interested in animal studies, the monstrous, queer studies, and the visual history of the
British Empire.

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INA LINGE
Beastly Butterflies: Sexual Nature in Sexology and Modern Dance
Butterflies are rarely described as beastly. In this paper, however, I want to argue that Loïe
Fuller’s ‘Butterfly Dance’, performed in Paris and elsewhere around 1900, brings out
precisely ‘beastly’ qualities via the figure of the butterfly: transgression, disturbance and
sexual perversity. Not only does the figure of the butterfly bring out these unseen beastly
qualities of Fuller’s pioneering modern dance, but in the metamorphosis performed on
stage it also represents the essence of modernism as transformation.
In this talk, I want to explore how ideas about the sexually ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ were co-
constructed by German sexological discourses and dance after 1900 via butterflies, both
literal and figurative. Drawing on literature and science studies and queer and feminist
theoretical approaches to nature and non-human animals, the talk investigates the work of
the German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his interest in butterflies, both as
model organisms for scientific study to prove the ‘intersexuality’ of all living things, and as
artistic representations in the form of the Butterfly Dance. This Butterfly Dance was
pioneered by the American dancer Loïe Fuller (1862 – 1928) and adapted by the Welsh
aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget (1875 – 1905), the 5 th Marquis of Anglesey. Following Fuller’s
and Paget’s performances of the Butterfly Dance, this talk investigates how both
performances explore concepts of sexual nature via the figure of the butterfly. I argue that
both performances express a version of sexual nature that does not offer a pastoral vision of
naturalised sexuality, but instead show an alternative vision of sexual nature, one that is
transgressive, disturbing and perverse and uniquely a product of modernist interventions
into the sexually ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. Finally, I argue that this competing vision of sexual
nature influences Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexological work, which turns towards butterfly
experiments to understand natural sexual variation.

BIO

Dr Ina Linge is Associate Research Fellow in the College of Humanities at the University of
Exeter, where she is also affiliated with the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Rethinking Sexology’
project. She holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. Ina has published
articles on fin-de-siècle and modernist literature and culture and the inter-dependence of
sexology and cultural productions, such as autobiography and film. Ina’s current project
investigates the meaning of ‘sexual nature’. Specifically, this research project considers the
importance of the non-human, in particular non-human animal evidence and the
representation of non-human animals, within the context of sexological discourses, visual
culture and performance in German-speaking countries and Britain after 1900.

 

CAMEO MARLATT
Letters for a Newfoundland Dog: A Creative and Zoopoetic Response to Woolf’s Flush and Barrie’s Peter Pan Texts
When Derrida found himself standing naked before his little cat, he knew he
was in the presence not of the allegorical animal of Western philosophical and
literary traditions, but of someone capable of responding to and looking back at him.
But can we say that Derrida’s call for specificity has been heard over the chorus of
positivist values such as objectivity, behaviourism, and fear of anthropomorphism
that limit even the literary-critical branch of animal studies?
Derrida coined the term ‘zoopoetics,’ but only recently has it become both a
critical methodology and creative practice interested in how attentiveness to the
poiesis of nonhuman animals enlightens human creative forms (Aaron Moe). It
embraces embodied empathy, emotion, and subjective experience – as well as the
curiousity Donna Haraway describes as the first duty of companion species – as
valuable resources for interspecies interaction and collaboration, and therefore
valuable sites for critical engagement.
In this creative paper, I apply a zoopoetic methodology to Virginia Woolf’s
Flush, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Peter and Wendy, by placing memoir alongside
critical analysis. I locate in these texts what Etienne Benson calls “embodied traces”
of the nonhuman animal by comparing their representation of dogs with
biographical material about Woolf’s spaniel Pinka and Barrie’s dogs Porthos and
Luath. Though engaged in the modernist task of interrogating the boundaries of the
human, Woolf and Barrie are also interested in what Erica Fudge calls the “animal as
animal.” Neither author simply uses the dog as an allegorical tool for social
commentary. The categories of lady’s lapdog in Woolf, and man’s working-breed dog
in Barrie, are deconstructed to reveal how gender and class influence the
overlapping lived and bodily experience of both humans and their domesticated
companion species. I include personal reflections on my relationship with my own
Newfoundland dog to illuminate the ways in which writing and reading about
animals is reciprocal with actual interspecies interactions. Therefore, zoopoetics is
of practical significance to the field of animal studies, which, as Cary Wolfe suggests,
is burdened with questions of ethics, vulnerability, and action.

BIO

Cameo Marlatt is a recent graduate of the University of Glasgow, with a Doctorate of
Fine Arts in Creative Writing, for which she wrote a series of essays and a collection
of poetry on the topics of Companion Species and Zoopoetics. She also has an MSc in
Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has been
published in Lighthouse, Plumwood Mountain, and Canary.

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JONATHAN MCALLISTER
‘Height of a tower? No, she can jump me’: The feline presence in Ulysses
Frank Budgen notes that James Joyce ‘had a considerable sympathy for the cat with its
persuasive manners and its compact self-sufficiencies’. Joyce kept and observed cats
while in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, with a photograph of 1913 showing Giorgio and
Lucia at the window of their Trieste flat, a cat embraced in Lucia’s arms. The
attentiveness to feline behavior and the cat's place in the Bloom family in Ulysses is thus
drawn from Joyce’s own observations of and cohabitation with this animal. Critically, the
turn of the twentieth century saw an epistemological shift in the knowledge of the
animal’s place in Irish society, with an increased presence of animals in the home. This
created a bifurcation of domestic animals into those kept as companions and those kept
for utilitarian purposes. My paper examines the trace of this dynamic bifurcation in the
relation of Leopold Bloom to his cat, and therefore offers a counterpoint to David
Rando’s 2009 essay ‘The Cat’s Meow: “Ulysses”, Animals, and the Veterinary Gaze’. It
situates the animal gaze of Bloom in its socio-economic context, in contrast to Rando’s
notion of the ‘veterinary gaze’. Further, I borrow ideas from the philosophy of Jacques
Derrida and John Berger to argue that this social reconfiguration of animal-human
relations allows Bloom’s cat to be read as a substitute for his dead son, Rudy. This idea is explicated through an anthrozoological reading – this being the science of animal-
human relations – to explore the nexus of associations between the cat and Rudy in Bloom’s psyche, which provides an insight into the often overlooked issue of the tripartite structure of Ulysses. I suggest that my reading offers a new way to explore this structure through the lens of deconstructing the animal-human divide, prompting the reader towards the limits of the human. My paper thus historicizes the integration of pets into the family unit in ways that disturb anthropocentrism and the anthropomorphic gaze.

BIO

Jonathan McAllister is an M.Phil student at Jesus College, Cambridge. He holds a First-
class honours degree in English from the University of Nottingham, where he received a

number of awards for his work. Currently, he is working on a thesis at the University of
Cambridge that examines Samuel Beckett’s directorial style, drawing on theories of
performance and dramaturgy.

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TRACY MCDONALD
A young gorilla meets the modernists Djuna Barnes, Eugenie Shonnard, and Eli Harvey
Tracy McDonald tells the story of Dinah, a young Gabonese gorilla who arrived at the New
York Zoological Park on 24 August 1914. She quickly became a celebrity. Her first brush with
fame was a meeting with modernist writer Djuna Barnes, who published her interview with
Dinah, “The Girl and the Gorilla,” in New York World magazine. Barnes’s piece touched on the
questions that modernism brought to human-nonhuman encounters, including social relations,
gender, capitalism, and shifting identities. Commissioned to sculpt a bust of Dinah, Eugenie
Shonnard gave a revealing interview about the time they spent together. McDonald’s paper
focuses on the encounters between these modernist artists and the captive gorilla, exploring their
implications for understanding empathy. Dinah’s story engages with several “Beastly Modernist”
themes, including: Animal Commodification and Capitalism; Race, Class, Sex and Gender;
Wildlife, Imperialism and Hunting; and Animal Trauma.

BIO

Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of Russian and Soviet history at McMaster University.
She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930,
published by University of Toronto Press. Currently, she is working on a history of animal
import-export and exhibition in the USSR and a biography of Dinah (1911-1915) a captive
gorilla. Her co-edited collection Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill-Queens University
Press) will be available in May 2019.

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RACHEL MURRAY
‘Earlier and Other: Marine Life in Modernist Writing’
Modernist writing teems with marine life: Pound’s delicate algae; Joyce’s unsightly oysters;
Woolf’s immortal fish; Eliot’s barnacle-encrusted crab; Marianne Moore’s paper nautilus;
H.D.’s quivering rock pool specimen; Lawrence’s indifferent shoals – these are just a few of
the creatures that populate its waters. The radical otherness of these life forms troubles the
boundaries of modernist form; much has been said about the Men of 1914’s disdain for the
‘jellyfish attributes’ of the internal, stream-of-consciousness method with its associations
with degeneracy and feminine fluidity.
Yet if the apparent formlessness and categorical
instability of marine life posed a threat to modernist writers, then it also, to paraphrase
Elizabeth Grosz, inspired possibilities of being otherwise. This paper will explore H.D. and
Eliot’s mutual fascination with organisms that blur the boundaries between animal and
vegetable – polyps, anemones, hydrophytes, sponges – occupying, in the words of H. G.
Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells, ‘a sort of no man’s land (or rather both man’s land)’
between the two.
Both writers detail formative encounters with aquatic life forms in their
work: Eliot spent his childhood summers staring into rockpools and collecting algae on the
Massachusetts coastline, while the young H.D. helped her grandfather, renowned phycologist
Francis Wolle, in the production of thousands of drawings of magnified diatoms. These ‘hints
of earlier and other creation’, I will argue, inspired H.D. and Eliot to recognise the creative
possibilities of formal indeterminacy and passive receptivity in their writing, exploring ways
of being that both precede and exceed humanist conceptions of the self as bounded, stable,
and sovereign.

BIO

Rachel is a Doctoral Prize Fellow at Loughborough University with research interests in
literary modernism, animal studies, and the environment. She has published peer-reviewed
articles on James Joyce and bees, and Samuel Beckett’s worms, the latter of which won the
2016 British Society for Literature and Science Early Career Essay Prize and was published
in the Journal of Literature and Science. She has also published articles on D. H. Lawrence,
Wyndham Lewis, and Henry James, as well as a book chapter on insects in language and
literature. Her book, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form, is forthcoming
with Edinburgh University Press, and she is currently beginning a new research project,
provisionally entitled Submarine Modernism.

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KRISTOFFER NOHEDEN
Excursions in the Night Side of Nature: Minotaurs and Other Surrealist Animals
In 1935, number 7 of the surrealist journal Minotaure was devoted to ‘Le Côté nocturne de la
nature’, the night side of nature. The theme extended the journal’s prevalent fascination with
mythological, speculative, and esoteric conceptions of animals and nature; yet, it also shows
that surrealism tends to exceed such symbolic projections. The contents page of the number in
question was adorned with a photograph by Man Ray of a woman’s naked upper body. Her
head obscured by darkness, the woman’s arms are lifted over it to form two horns, while
skilful use of shadows renders her torso into the visage of a bull. The issue also features many
photographs of animals, from owls to praying mantises. The latter illustrate Roger Caillois’s
essay ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, which, much like Man Ray’s photograph,
investigate the mechanisms behind identity dissolution and the porous borders between
humans and other animals. In this paper, I seek to show that while the surrealists writing in
and illustrating Minotaure tend to connect loss of instrumental reason with the animal, rather
than demonstrating a view of animals as void of reason and agency, these connections suggest
intricate, interspecies relations. In an earlier issue of Minotaure the surrealist physician Pierre
Mabille wrote that humans and animals develop a shared visceral unconscious. Recalling
German psychology influenced by notions of animal magnetism, Mabille’s essay indicates
that it is precisely in its conceptions of the unconscious, no longer believed to be confined to
human interiority, that surrealism most effectively troubles the borders between humans and
other animals. In that spirit, I argue, Man Ray’s photograph does not so much designate a
headless eclipse of reason, as it imagines an overlapping of human and animal faculties,
which recurs throughout Minotaure and surrealism in general.

BIO

Kristoffer Noheden is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University.
He is the author of Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth (2017), and a number
of articles and book chapters on surrealism in relation to ecology, film theory, and exhibition
history. He is co-editor with Abigail Susik of a volume in-progress, Absolutely Modern
Mysteries: Surrealism and Film after 1945, and with Grazina Subelyte and Daniel Zamani of
another volume in-progress on the topic of surrealism and mythology. Noheden’s current
book project concerns animals and ecology in surrealist art, film, and writings from 1919 to
2018.

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MAUREEN O’CONNOR
Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction
I propose discussing the Irish Modernism of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction through the figure of the
non-human. The nonhuman, whether “animate” or “inanimate,” contributes to the distinct
humour and “queerness” of Bowen’s writing, affecting both form and content. Maud Ellmann
has observed of Bowen’s work that “every object has a psyche; in fact, her objects even have
neuroses,” while Carrie Rohman maintains that modernism is the first literature to “register” the
psychic eruption of “animality” through the fragmentation and discontinuity of “circuitous and
unstable narrative devices.” The appearance of animals in a text always introduces formal
instability and poses a potential threat to the illusion of human superiority and identity, often
through humiliation or comic deflation. The work of new materialists, such as Karen Barad, has
proposed more radical challenges to received ideas about human centrality by undermining
foundational divisions including the assumed separation between the animate and the inanimate,
“the human and its ‘others.’” Bowen has always disrespected this separation, and the
“queerness” that refuses such divisions, while insisting on difference, demonstrates just how
possible numerous impossibilities actually are, revising our understandings of, according to
Barad, “causality, matter, space and time.”
Impossibilities preoccupy Bowen, particularly those that obtain through the suspension
of “logic” and allow for contradictory realities to co-exist. Houses and objects in The Last
September manifest more liveliness than any of the novel’s human characters, liveliness conveyed
through unsettling figurative language, such as a doorway that “yearn[s] up the path like an eye-
socket,” or a piece of paper that creeps “on the floor like a living handkerchief.” The disavowed
and terrifying closeness of the human and the nonhuman animal also disturbs the complacencies
of Bowen’s characters. In her children’s book, The Good Tiger, rude, nosy neighbour Mrs Jones
can only express her terror at encountering a tiger at a birthday party by quacking, an unconscious acknowledgement of her position in the food chain as prey. The “pellucid, sane,”
and thoroughly modern, logical sophisticates of the story “The Cat Jumps,” also revert to their
animal selves with very little provocation. The vexed status of the animal in Irish culture,
whether it is the historic “bestialisation” of the “native” Irish, or the often derisory association of
the Anglo-Irish with dogs and horses, along with Bowen’s treatment of inanimate “others,” are
central to the unique Modernism of her fiction.

BIO

Maureen O’Connor lectures in the School of English in University College Cork. She is the
author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing as well as the editor and
co-editor of a number of volumes, including a recent special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies on “Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.” She has published and delivered
keynote addresses around the world on the subject of the animal in Irish writing as well as other
relevant topics in ecocriticism and ecofeminism. She has recently completed a monograph on the
fiction of Edna O’Brien and is currently working on a book about vegetarianism, nationalism,
and Irish first-wave feminism, working title, Nation and Nature.

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KATE O'DONOVAN

The fringes of Finnegans Wake are inhabited by all manner of creatures that are hidden in
portmanteau words, puns, and both literary and historical references. It is in this manner of
ever-presence yet marginalisation, as it were, that Joyce’s final work comes to resemble the
structure of medieval manuscripts, as ‘[b]y the thirteenth century […] the margins of [these]
manuscripts began to be populated with small animals in human parody’ (The Beast Within,
p.90). Joyce’s book, much like a medieval bestiary, contains a significant number of bizarre
animals; there are fabular beasts that sing and dance, animals that talk and act in so human
a manner that it is difficult to call them animals at all, and hybrid creatures that appear both
human and animal simultaneously. Given this parallel to medieval texts, this paper will focus
on a comparison between Royal MS 12 F XIII (also known as the Rochester Bestiary) and one
of the Wake’s most significant hybrids: the hen-woman Biddy Doran. Through this
comparison, accompanied by an application of Giambattista Vico’s theory on being human
(found in The New Science), I will argue that this tale of a hen resembles a medieval bestiary
entry, in which animals are used to teach humans how to be human.

BIO

Kate O’Donovan is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of
London. Her thesis examines Joyce’s exploration of the division between human and non-
human animals in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Her other research interests include:
Object-Orientated Ontology, the plays of Howard Barker, and Animal Studies.

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CHARLOTTE O’NEILL
Vegetarianism and Modernist Self-Fashioning in the Writings of Edward Carpenter
The long career of English poet, essayist and socialist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)
straddled the Victorian and Modernist epochs. His extensive body of work is indicative of the wider cultural radicalism that germinated and flourished during this tumultuous transition. Mirroring what Harriet Ritvo terms the ‘animal turn’ in the contemporary humanities, scholars such as Jed Mayer and Wendy Parks lend increasing scrutiny to Carpenter’s pro-animal politics. Compassion toward the nonhuman animal forms an underexplored component of the complex unitary metaphysic Carpenter expresses throughout his writing, whereby humanity must strive towards ‘cosmic consciousness,’ a recognition of man’s intrinsic unity with all phenomenal life. To do so, Carpenter contends, humanity must shed the restrictive trappings of bourgeois, hyper-industrial Victorian ‘civilisation’; this rejection of Victorian society in favour of a radical utopian future is, I argue, a characteristically Modernist impulse. In a 1909 address to the Vegetarian Society, Carpenter describes the ‘nineteenth century’ as the ‘nadir of descent into the inferno of civilisation,’ symptoms of which include ‘the eating of meat,’ a diet catalysed by industrial slaughter. Vegetarianism, by contrast, is spreading ‘with rapidity amongst modern populaces,’ embedding a sensitivity towards nature that precipitates ‘a new plane of life.’ (Vegetarianism p.316). This paper focusses on Carpenter’s practice of vegetarianism, exploring its role in his broader self-fashioning as a modern radical who rejected the rituals of Victorian gentility. Noting Carpenter’s aversion to the ‘ancient looking patriarchs’ associated with prominent vegetarian movements, I delineate two strategies he used for vegetarianism’s re- presentation. Firstly, in place of morality-based and animal-centred arguments for vegetarianism, Carpenter favoured an esoteric brand of contemporary nutritional science. Secondly, he candidly described his lapses in vegetarianism, in line with a vociferous objection to ‘absolute rule[s]’ for living. (Carpenter 1916, p.101). These strategies demonstrate the contested, ambiguous nature of Carpenter’s nonhuman politic, signposting the need for its further critical exploration.

BIO

Charlotte O’Neill is a first year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Sheffield.
Following on from previous research on the animal rights writing of late Victorian activist and writer
Edward Carpenter, their thesis interrogates his work in the broader context of the nonhuman.

 

RODOLFO PISKORSKI
‘Deeper within darkness’: animal reality, poetic representation, and the nested form of Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought-Fox’ 
Ted Hughes is known for nature and ‘animal’ poems such as ‘The Thought-Fox’ (1957), but in his essay ‘Capturing Animals’ he emphasises that any poem can be ‘like an animal’. He thus foregrounds a certain animality of poetic form, to the expense of a certain animal ‘content’, as crucial both to the overall work of poetry but especially to the vital project of representing animal reality. I take him at his word and read his famous poem for two crucial animalistic (i.e. formal) aspects: the visual playfulness of the repeated letter w standing in for a fox paw print on the snow and, more importantly, his use of punctuation (the colon) as a tool to section the poem. I argue that the formal architectonics of the poem both perform and present a project of poetic representation that sets it apart from regular human experience. Crucially, this representational practice grants the human the ability to approach the other-than-human hard materiality of animals (the scriptural paw prints), and thus singles out poetry as necessary to maintain any ‘communion’ with nature. I argue that this polemics regarding the representation of nature, as well as the formal techniques and the manifesto-like character of ‘The Thought-Fox’, stems from a desire to renovate poetic language and mimesis against the background of both a modern estrangement from nature and the modernist crisis in the representational powers of language.

BIO

Rodolfo Piskorski holds a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from Cardiff University, Wales, where he is University Teacher in Portuguese. His research focuses on the interface between animality and textuality. His work has appeared in The Journal of Literary Theory, Humanimalia, and The Journal of Critical Animal Studies, among others.

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MARTIN POVER

Carceri: Piranesi’s Fanciful Images of Prisons.
An investigation into the space of the contemporary zoo.
Whilst I confess to a lifelong fascination with the zoos it was not until I met Piranesi in the British museum
and the very next week was confronted with an empty cage in the Tiergarten in Berlin, did I realize I was
looking at two versions of the same thing - an invented prison. Both were fantastical and frightening in
equal measure.
Zoological gardens draw crowds all over the world in many countries. The exhibition of wildlife in the midst
of civilized societies has been a constant of human history, because, suggests Rachel Poliquin in The
Breathless Zoo, “it has helped people to place themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Human
beings seem to need the wild and endlessly seek it out.” Although purporting to offer insights into nature,
zoos isolate species from one another, disrupting any natural interaction between different groups of
animals, reptiles, fish and birds. Animals are caged, or confined in glasshouses or pits – incarcerated,
disenfranchised, and disempowered.
The topographic method and formal visual geometry of the photography emphasises containment and
display. The camera articulates views for the spectator; perspective organises imagery around a single
viewing position. This ego-centric system is not exclusive to the visual arts; the fourth wall viewpoint
offered by the proscenium arch stage, similarly ‘plays’ to the audience. Zoological gardens, likewise, are
constructed in terms of the theatre of exhibition. Excluding the protagonist and therefore plot, we avoid any
possibility of empathy, or worse, ‘anthropomorphism – the constant enemy. The greatest crime’ says Mark
Dion.
The Carceri photographs form a contribution to contemporary zoo photography in a fine art context. The
work constitutes a critical intervention which bridges the always human-focussed New Objectivity of
Candida Hofer's Zoologischer Garten, and the overtly political animal advocacy images of Britta Jaschinski.
Cumulatively, the photographs collapse the roles of human visitor and captive zoo animal into one, and
raise difficult and urgent questions about both.

BIO

Martin Pover lives and works in London as a photographer, and has lectured in
Fine Art, Printmaking, Graphic Design and Photography at the Slade, Middlesex
University and, most recently as Course Leader in Photography at the University
for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey.
The Carceri work is ‘ongoing’ and has been published in Portfolio magazine with
an essay by Liz Wells. It has been exhibited as a set of 26 1m x 1m. prints in New
York, Krakow, Poland, Den Helder in the Netherlands, and in the Brighton Photo
Biennial. Two pictures from the series are currently on show at the Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition.

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ROSIE ROBERTS

Pan: A Cinematic Essay

‘Why did we get up from our four points of contact to give ourselves this concentrated
stance? To distance our head from the ground and our hearts from the earth. What could
happen if we got back down?’ – excerpt from Pan (script)
Pan is a short essay film proposing landscape as metaphor, written and directed in Scotland
by Rosie Roberts in 2018. The piece investigates both human and non-human interactions,
mobilising ‘elrick’ or ‘dear run’ - a landscape feature in which animals were pre-historically
hunted – to enact these nuanced relationships. Taking this feature as a metaphor for the
feeling of being ‘hounded’, the director takes her dogs and friends to this feature and
explores changing connections through looking, feeling and writing in the landscape.
Building on these connections the director explores her relationship with long-term mental
illness and demi-fluctuant recovery. The film and its characters embody the conferences
ethos of ‘aesthetic transformation, instigating a refashioning of how we think about,
encounter, and live with animals.’ Our understanding of our history with them in landscape,
as companions and colleagues is problematized. Central to the making process was Donna
Haraway’s thoughts regarding categorisation and her proposal to; ‘try speaking with things,
an activity in which intellectual and political practices are knotted into myriad material
contexts – not all of them human'. Pan’s duration is 11 minutes and the screening is accompanied by physical copy of the script that participants are welcome to take away, an act that gestures toward a generous and
cathartic group reading practice. The script, written simultaneously to the cinematographic
process in order to subvert the relationship between script writing and image making. A
brief introduction to the academic and artistic context of the film would be included in the
presentation.

BIO

Rosie Roberts is an artist, writer and filmmaker from Glasgow. She is currently a post-
graduate practice-based researcher at Glasgow School Art within the Master of Letters in

Art Writing programme lead by Laura Edbrook. Her research gestures towards moments of
relief, companionship and self-stimulation. Having worked throughout the islands of the
North Atlantic for the last four years, her process also weaves histories of transformation
and a subversion of the male voice into the narrative fabric of her investigations. Rosie
intends to contribute to the field of those offering a fuller account of understanding
women’s lives through combining feminist perspectives and poetic approaches.

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CARRIE ROHMAN
Most Awful Scratches: Authorizing Animals in D. H. Lawrence
My recent work on concepts of the bioaesthetic has led to an interest in the question of animal
“authority” in modernist literature. How are animals represented or experienced as authorizing
forces or as “authors” in literature of the modernist period? What qualities of authority are called
upon when animals become sources of sanctioning, knowledge, or permission in literary work?
If we re-frame something like Foucault’s outlining of an “author-function” in discursive
practices to accommodate animal authority, the question of the author becomes a much more
radically open question than Foucault could have anticipated. What replaces the apotheosis of
écriture in an animalized framework? Is it Derrida’s animot? Is it a zoopoetics that bears witness
to humans’ entanglement with life, as a repressed or disavowed “given” of writing? How do
animal authorities profoundly affect the kinship between writing and death that Foucault (and
Barthes) elaborate? Is the evocation of an animal authority in creative or artistic work a “radical”
refusal of the proper name, of the individual mark, or does it rather concede that the operations
of authentification and verification (tied to self-presence, in at least some sense) ought to be
accorded to animals, also? Along these lines, this paper explores moments of animal “authority”
in D. H. Lawrence’s work such as the rabbit’s scratch in Women in Love, that can be read in
relation to theories of literacy, and the “piercing” beaks of birds in poems from Birds, Beasts,
and Flowers, that suggest a blood-conscious animal marking or tracing.

BIO

CARRIE ROHMAN is Professor of English at Lafayette College. She has published widely in animal studies, modernism, posthumanism, and performance, in such journals as Deleuze Studies, Modernism/modernity, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Hypatia, and a number of edited volumes.  She is the author ofStalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia 2009) and Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Oxford 2018).  Carrie has also worked as a modern dancer and choreographer, within and outside of the academy, for more than twenty years.  Her most recent animal-related performance explored memorializing the extinct passenger pigeon, in collaboration with installation artist and musician Michael Pestel (2014).

 

MIEKE ROSCHER
Beastly Modernisms and Anti-modernisms: Breeding Animals in the Third Reich
In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a heated debate among German historians about the modernist heritage of the Third Reich. Based mainly on the rather reduced definition that modernism equals progressiveness, some historians refused to acknowledge the Nazi’s entanglement with the modernist agenda outright, whereas others saw National Socialism as the dark side of modernism.
The tension between the futurist perspectives of a Thousand Year Reich that was at the same time to be seen as rooted in a mythical Germanic past was not easily resolved. Although the discussion has since been far less at the centre of what German historians saw as futile for the understanding of National Socialism as such, this original disagreement has not lost its weight. Based on my empirical findings and my approach of a political animal history of the Third Reich, I want to therefore show how bringing in the animals reveals this tension as the heart of where national socialist ideology stood in terms of modernism. Taking animal breeding as an example, I will present arguments that within this one single issue we can see the simultaneity of modern and anti-modern elements in Nazi-ideology and practices at work. Breeding the proper animals was seen as way for economic autarky, genetic enhancement and species survival, all of which can be regarded as modernist approaches. Yet at the same time, these approaches were based on an ideology that prioritised what can be dubbed “Germanic” animals over others, thereby reverting to anti-modernist and folklorist notions such as blood and soil and “Lebensraum”. Thus, I hope to contribute with the paper to the discussion of how, by looking at animals, we can help to provide a more nuanced picture of what modernity really entails.

BIO

Mieke Roscher is assistant professor for social and cultural history and the history of human-
animal relations at the University of Kassel, Germany. Her academic interests centre on
colonial and gender history, the history the Third Reich as well as animal historiography.

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DEREK RYAN

Beastly Bloomsbury

BIO

Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent and author of Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh UP, 2015) and Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life(Edinburgh UP, 2013). He has published work on modernism and animality in Deleuze Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature and Modern Fiction Studies, and has recently co-edited two volumes: The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (Routledge, 2019). Derek is currently Literature Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and a co-editor of the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography.

 

ANUSHKA SEN
Stray Cats and Transported Cattle: Shades of the Urban in T.S. Eliot and James Joyce
Over the last decade, a formidable body of scholarship—led by the likes of Carrie Rohman
and Derek Ryan—has emerged to centre the animal as a fundamental concern for
modernism, opening up thrilling possibilities for modernism’s contribution to animal studies.
However, this scholarship has not significantly addressed one of modernism’s central
narratives—its intimate relationship with the urban; rather, the investment has been in
modernist representations of the wilderness and the “primitive” (as in Philip Armstrong) or in
a primarily symbolic, linguistic or ontological/metaphysical understanding of the modernist
animal (as in Derek Ryan) without fully considering the urban habitat in which such animals
often appear. Ecocritical scholars such as Joshua Schuster have emphasized the distinctive,
industrially inflected ecology that pervades modernist literature. In this aspect, I follow their
work while focusing more on the literary relationship between animal and urban environment
than on questions central to ecocriticism.
A question I pursue in this context is whether urban animals in modernism appear as alien to
the city, injecting it with their nonhuman wilderness, or whether they emanate from urban
matter and express a fundamentally urban identity. In considering this question, I explore the
role of cats in T.S. Eliot’s poetry and cattle in James Joyce’s Ulysses (also linking them to
less canonical authors). In both writers, I argue, animals are inextricable from their urban
setting but unsettle urban ubiquity by drawing attention to themselves and consequently,
provoking scrutiny of the features defining their urban origin. Further, I demonstrate how
Eliot’s animals exude their potency from within a classic definition of urban, rooted in the city,
while Joyce’s animals delineate the different layers comprising an ambivalent, irregular
version of the urban. In the process, I wish to further the understanding of the urban as
heterogeneous but always bound to the animal.

BIO

Anushka Sen is a PhD student from India, currently in her third year at Indiana University’s
department of English. She works on how the presence of animals and other nonhumans
complicate and enrich narratives of urban modernism. Her passions include pedagogy,
activism, and poetry. She has presented a paper on the urban-rural continuum in Zora Neale
Hurston’s shorter fiction, and on the underground valences of George Herrman’s Krazy Kat.*
She hopes to eventually work on the intersections of human-animal relations, caste, religion
and urban life in the Indian context.
* Due to present at the MELUS conference at Cincinnati in March 21-24, 2019.

 

CATHRYN SETZ
From the telluric depths: transition’s beastly modernism
The field of periodical studies has expanded greatly in recent years. We have an ever-growing body of digitized sources, which has hugely increased our understanding. Modernist culture swims through bespoke presses and glossy Sunday supplements alike, and demands further analysis. But how might we read them, beyond biographies and indexes? Scholars such as Eric White and Céline Mansanti have made significant inroads into the field, focusing on transatlantic nationalisms, and “organic” or “soft” modernism respectively. This paper takes one document in particular, which is perhaps the largest of the “little” magazines: Eugene and Maria Jolas’s transition (1927–1938). I will attempt to outline a different kind of methodology, testing the idea that a good way of reading this extraordinary magazine—famous for publishing Joyce’s “Work in Progress” throughout its run—is through its animal metaphors. The magazine is, in fact, fullof animals. From Kafka’s unspecified Ungeziefer or “unclean” animal at the heart of “Metamorphosis” (published for the first time in English in transition) to the amoeboid shapes in abstract art and Surrealist-influenced poetry, one can, perhaps, read a shared fascination with creatures from what Jolas repeatedly refers to as the “telluric depths”, as part of his sustained “Revolution of the Word”. I will focus on one area in particular: the lizard. Why do we find figurative reptiles through the magazine? How do they related to the 1920s fascination with the inhuman “third” or “pineal eye”? The overlooked German poet Gottfried Benn’s various contributions over the years, some of which was highly dubious, offer space for consideration. By assessing this and related material I will tentatively propose what might be called a “primordial modernism”: a quasi-Jungian, quasi-antihumanist, not-quite collective sensibility as authors turned again and again to creatures furthest from ourselves as part of their aesthetic practice. What are the implications of reading in this way? Is it helpful in approaching what Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold have called the “dark side” of modernism?

BIO

Cathryn Setz is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Together with Elizabeth Pender she is Co-Editor of Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Penn State University Press, 2019), and with Len Gutkin and Sophie Oliver she is working on a collaborative Selected Letters of Djuna Barnes project. Her first book, Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, _transition_ (1927--1938) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) explores animal metaphors as a way of reading Maria and Eugene Jolas's major international modernist magazine, and her current research focuses on the history of popular biology and its intersections with North American literary journals, especially during the 1920s and the so-called "Eclipse of Darwinism". She has also written articles on contemporary fiction and essays for a range of journals, including Textual Practice, the Times Literary Supplement, and The LA Review of Books. 

 

FLICKA SMALL
‘Microbes, Germs, Bacteria’: Living micro-organisms in James Joyce’s
Ulysses
If the thought of a colony of mites scuttling over cheese makes your stomach turn
consider Bloom’s ‘Mity cheese’. Bacteria, yeasts, and moulds come together to form
a microbial community and the bacterium, closely related to that which produces feet
and body odours, gives the ‘feety savour’ to the Gorgonzola sandwich so beloved by
Bloom.
19thC improvements in the microscope stimulated an interest in natural history:
Louis Pasteur proved that the souring of milk was caused by living organisms and
Robert Koch identified the organisms that caused tuberculosis. Both Pasteur and
Koch are referenced in Ulysses, and Bloom talks about the ‘incalculable trillions of
billions of millions of imperceptible molecules’ in ‘microbes, germs and bacteria’.
Mr Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc) says that the ‘greylunged citizens contract adenoids
[and] pulmonary complaints by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in the dust. Safe food
and personal hygiene are issues for Bloom as he watches a young man spread a
batch of microbes from one item to another as he polishes a tumbler, knife and fork;
but he also recognises that microbes, germs and bacteria are nature’s heroes;
they break down dead things into ‘corpsemanure’ and ‘mulch of dung’, in a
never-ending cycle of ‘food, chyle, blood, dung, earth and food’.

BIO

Flicka Small’s PhD Thesis centres on the ‘Semiotics of Food’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Recently she has been working on the relationship between food and mental health or the
gut/brain axis on fictional characters in literature. Flicka is a tutor and co-ordinator of the
seminar “Edible Ireland” in the School of English, University College Cork. She has given
papers on the work of James Joyce at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; Dublin, London
and Trieste.
Flicka co-authored the chapter ‘The Food Culture of the Iveragh Peninsula' in The Atlas of
the Iveragh Penisula. Cork University Press (2009), and wrote ‘What Food Says about
Leopold Bloom’ in Tickling the Palate: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture. Eds
Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher. Peter Lang (2014).

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