Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity

ISBN-13: 9783030989149 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022

Sune Borkfelt

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"Reading Slaughter makes an important contribution to animal studies. Well-researched and wide-ranging, it is a commendable work of survey and close reading that takes one of the key sites of human-animal relations, the slaughterhouse, and subjects it to a long overdue book-length interrogation. ... it is a welcome reminder of why we have literary animal studies in the first place." (Dominic O'Key, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, May 8, 2023)

Spis treści

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

O autorze

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.