Borkfelt Reading Slaughter

Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-030-98915-6
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 279 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity examines literary depictions of slaughterhouses from the development of the industrial abattoir in the late nineteenth century to today. The book focuses on how increasing and ongoing isolation and concealment of slaughter from the surrounding society affects readings and depictions of slaughter and abattoirs in literature, and on the degree to which depictions of animals being slaughtered creates an avenue for empathic reactions in the reader or the opportunity for reflections on human-animal relations. Through chapters on abattoir fictions in relation to narrative empathy, anthropomorphism, urban spaces, rural spaces, human identities and horror fiction, Sune Borkfelt contributes to debates in literary animal studies, human-animal studies and beyond.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Borkfelt, Sune

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Fleshing Out Invisibilities

            Visibility and Slaughterhouse Histories

 

            Decoding Slaughterhouses

            Heterotopias and the Invisibility of Violence and Death

            Literature and the Invisible Slaughterhouse

            Scope and Outline of Reading Slaughter

2 Literary Narratives and the Empathics of Slaughter

 

            Delimitations and Definitions

            Literary Empathy and Animals: Exclusions and Misconceptions

            Empathy and Anonymous Animals

            Empathy and Nonhuman Individualities

            Emotion, Context, and Distance to Slaughter

 

            Empathy, Vulnerability, Sentimentalism, and Care

3 Anthropomorphism and the Abattoir

Slaughter and the Anthropomorphic Animal

            Narrating Bovine Mythology in James Agee’s ‘A Mother’s Tale’

            Absurdity and Anthropomorphism: Astley’s The End of My Tether

            Slaughter, Anthropomorphism, Empathy

4 Flesh of the City: Slaughterhouses and the Urban

Concealment and Deindividualization: Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard

            Slaughter and the Working Beast

            The Proud Slaughterer’s Sense of Place: Hind’s The Dear Green Place

Humans and Animals: Parallel Disappearances in the Urban

5 Ruralities and the Abattoir

Nostalgia, Rurality, and ‘A Question of Place’

            Bovines and Rural/Urban Contrasts: Sterchi’s The Cow

            Rurality, Care Ethics, and Empathy

6 Who Slaughters and Who Consumes? On Butcher(ing) Identities

            Shades of Whiteness, Absence of Blackness

            Violence in the Workplace: Deviance and Marginalization

            (En)Gendered Slaughter

 

            Slaughter, Identities, Animals

7 Dark Spaces: The Horrific Slaughterhouse

            Vulnerable Animal Horrors

            Being Meat: Others Eating Humans

            Cannibalism and the Abattoir

8 Coda

Über Autor(innen)

Sune Borkfelt lectures at Aarhus University, Denmark. His publications include articles and book chapters on nonhuman otherness, postcolonial animals, the naming of nonhuman animals, and the ethics of animal product marketing. He is also co-author of a critical research-based Danish book on hunting.