“The Agency and Matter of the Dead Horse in the Victorian Novel”
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Tarih
2019
Yazarlar
Dergi Başlığı
Dergi ISSN
Cilt Başlığı
Yayıncı
Chicago University Press
Erişim Hakkı
info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Özet
In an attempt to move away from the anthropocentric approaches to the study of literary animals as mere metaphors or symbols of the cultural work that they do for humans, in this essay I try to address the question of how to “confuse and conflate” literature, humans, and animals – an idea borrowed from Mario Ortiz-Robles. In moulding a posthumanist theoretical framework for my discussion, I draw on Karen Barad’s work on “agential realism,” focusing specifically on her notions of “intra-action” and “ethico-onto-epistem-ology”; Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”; and Bruno Latour’s “Actor Network Theory.” I argue that from the mid-nineteenth century onward novelists like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were preoccupied with equine death not only because the horse occupied a central place in the social and economic organization of contemporary human society, but also as a result of their awareness of the ontological and Darwinian affinity between human and nonhuman animals, at the center of which was – as Derrida powerfully expressed – mortality. I show how in “confusing and conflating” literature, humans, and animals, Eliot and Hardy intra-acted with, but also responded to, felt an “ethico-onto-epistem-ological” responsibility for, wrote about, gave central roles, and thus accorded narrative agency to dead horses: Wildfire in Silas Marner and Prince in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, respectively. I also define Eliot and Hardy as “semantic humanimals” who, in grafting their responses to equine mortality on matter by writing about horses, in effect, represented and reflected upon their daily experience of horses in their everyday environments, giving visibility and agency to equine bodies. I suggest that such a reading of literary works serves toward our need to develop a notion of (animal) mortality rather than being tied to the evidently limited notion of (human) morality to understand and acknowledge the agency of animals, both human and nonhuman.
Açıklama
Anahtar Kelimeler
Horses, Human-animal relationships, Horses-Social aspects
Kaynak
Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity
WoS Q Değeri
Scopus Q Değeri
Cilt
Sayı
Künye
Akıllı, Sinan. “The Agency and Matter of the Dead Horse in the Victorian Novel.” Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity. Eds. Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld. Animal Lives. Series Eds. Jane C. Desmond, Barbara J. King, and Kim Marra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 39-53.
