This course investigates the depiction of animals in relation to the human – by introducing pertinent works in particular of the German literary and visual tradition: What defines an animal? Can the animal speak, can it suffer, can it be understood? What does it mean to be looked at by an animal? What happens when we love a pet? In what way does the animal challenge our thinking of ethics, gender, and identity? How do writers and artists explore the demarcation between the human and the canine, how do they challenge the denigration of the animal in Western philosophy?
We will trace the paths of wolves, horses, cats, dogs, mice, rats, and snakes who destabilize and reconfigure literary texts, theories of knowledge, Western anthropocentrism and bio-politics.
Readings include Ludwig Tieck’s “Blond Eckbert,” the Grimm Brothers’ “Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Murr, the Tomcat, Franz Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” and Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” Visual examples include films such as Ulrich Seidel’s Animal Love and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, as well as artworks by Albrecht Dürer, Franz Marc, Walt Disney, and Jeff Koons. Theoretical reflections on the status of the animal include Giorgio Agamben, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Vicki Hearne, Sarah Kofman, and Peter Singer.
Taught in English.
About Professor Behrmann
Nicola Behrmann’s research touches on literary theory, gender and media studies, and includes the history of the avant-garde, archive and memory, autobiography, European realism and literature in exile. Her monograph, Geburt der Avantgarde – Emmy Hennings (Wallstein, April 2018), reconsiders the hidden contribution of women writers to the European avant-garde movements and critically reflects the possibility of a feminist revision of historiography.
Her current book project, Hunger Artists: Labor and Poverty in German Texts, focuses on the registers of productive versus unproductive labor in literary works, the modality of limitless privation and representation, and the libidinal economies implemented in the labor of the poor. The study circulates around a number of tropes and theories drawn from philosophy (the concept of Sorge, time), religion (asceticism), economics (property, speculation), and psychoanalysis (incorporation, work of mourning).