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Zoopoetics


Zoopoetics has been defined as "the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species' bodily poiesis." It assumes many actual, biological animals possess agency to craft gestures, vocalizations—clear material signs—in order to create social cohesion with conspecifics and other animals.

Zoopoetics is not a minor event in poetry, nor is it limited to human spheres. Other species discover innovative forms of their bodily poiesis, through, at times, an attentiveness towards humans. Many disciplines have contributed to the radical revaluation of the animal in culture and society; zoopoetics further contributes through tracing the implications of Whitman’s insight, that animals, including humans, follow the “same old law” of a bodily poiesis.

Jacques Derrida first used the term in The Animal that Therefore I Am (an address first delivered in 1997), speaking of “Kafka’s vast zoopoetics.” And so, in the broadest sense, zoopoetics suggests the presence of nonhuman animals within a text. In a 2008 dissertation, Christopher White establishes another facet of zoopoetics by conflating it with the term zoosemiotics (the sign-systems of nonhuman animals), and he uses both terms to explore the presence and sign-systems of animals in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Another facet of zoopoetics is explored in “Zoopoetics: A Look at Cummings, Merwin, & the Expanding Field of Ecocriticism.” Here, zoopoetics is more of an approach that “gravitates to the agency of nonhuman animals” within both the ecosphere and within texts. The notion of animal agency is defined by how nonhuman animals are imaginative, rhetorical, and cultural beings. The essay draws upon the well-known rhetorician, George Kennedy, who published a controversial article in 1992: “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric.” In it, Kennedy argues that all animals, human and nonhuman, “share a ‘deep’ universal rhetoric.” This rhetoric is not founded on sign-systems but rather upon what he calls the “rhetorical energy” of the gestures that deliver those sign-systems. Animals (including humans) constantly navigate rhetorical situations by delivering gestures to an audience with a specific purpose. Kennedy’s article challenged one of the long-standing assumptions concerning the difference between humans and animals, for he sees language as less of a distinguishing mark of human exceptionality and more of a commonality given the evolutionary origin shared by many animals. (For a recapitulation of the history of the response to Kennedy's article, as well as a defense of the ideas within it, see Debra Hawhee's "Toward a Bestial Rhetoric.")


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