Abstract
Abstract ‘People enough that are called fox, pig or lamb. But the other way round?’: a zoopoetical comparison between Charlotte Mutsaers' and La Fontaine’s animal texts This article aims to highlight the yet unexplored zoopoetical relation of the Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942-) to the famous animal fables of Jean de la Fontaine. A couple of important animal configurations will be identified in Mutsaers’s work through the analysis of animal discursive devices and metamorphoses in La Fontaine. In this respect, La Fontaine’s fable ‘La Chatte métamorphosée en femme’ (‘The cat metamorphosed into a woman’) (1688-1693) will be compared with Mutsaers’s novel Koetsier Herfst (2008). The literary-philosophical frameworks of metamorphosis and hybridity as well as the becoming-animal motif, drawn from research in the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), will prove useful to show how animal aspects in Mutsaers and La Fontaine relate to each other and correlate with different political discourses about the animal. The analysed creative and discursive human-animal patterns in Mutsaers’s and La Fontaine’s texts set out significant social-philosophical reversals of perspective about the animal-human bond and shed new light on Mutsaers’s artistic practice.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
