Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Silence Created Distance, Jason Lange

Writing Theses

No abstract provided.

Anthropomorphism In Aesop's Fables, Nasih Alam

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Generally, Aesop’s The Complete Fables is considered didactic for children. In my paper, I discuss how Aesop represents nonhumans in his fables and how they could negatively affect the psychology of children aged 7-12 if we as parents, teachers and legal guardians do not become conscious of its problematic didactic function. I show that most of the anthropomorphized animals in The Complete Fables have anthropocentric and provide environmentally harmful rhetorics. In order to keep the required length of paper in mind, I have limited myself to five tales from Aesop’s The Complete Fables, to show how and where the rhetoric …

Powerful Particulars As “Autodocuments” In Documentality, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The purpose of this short paper is to sketch the problem of whether documentality, in the sense of the appearance of evidence, must always take the form of a type-token relationship. In contrast to a type-token epistemology common in the Library and Information Science tradition, the paper argues that there is precedence for a theory of documentality that views evidentiality as a product of the powers of particulars to make themselves present. To make this argument, it appeals to Robert Pagès theory of documents and, over a half century later, Bernd Frohmann’s proposal for a philosophy of information, “Documentality.” Such …

The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement, Mei Bock

Honors Projects

A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.

Tolkien’S Animals: A Bibliography, Kris Swank

Journal of Tolkien Research

Bibliography of scholarly and popular science research on Tolkien’s various animal species includes more than 100 English-language entries from literary, mythological, cultural, historical, philological, psychological, religious, and scientific perspectives. Includes entries on animal sentience/personhood, general surveys of animals, and analysis of specific species: bats, bears (including Beorn), birds, cats, cryptids, deer, dogs (including wolves and foxes), dragons, elephants, horses, sea-life, and spiders.

Of Foxes, Dancing Bears, And Wolves, John Rosegrant

Journal of Tolkien Research

When in “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien expressed his Faërian wish to understand the proper speech of animals, he was longing to relate with animals in a way that combined communion with them and respect for their separate natures. But the exuberance with which Tolkien expressed this wish changed over time. His early writings are rampant with talking animals and other forms of human-animal condensation in which the animals nevertheless retain their own agency; later in life he grew uneasy with what he now believed to be unrealistic and un-Catholic formulations. Nevertheless, the Faërian wish was so important to him that he …

Introduction To The Special Issue On Tolkien's Animals, Kris Swank

Journal of Tolkien Research

Introduction to the Special Issue on Tolkien's Animals

New Bibliographies Help Answer Questions About Animals And Metals In The Book Of Mormon

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Book of Mormon mentions animals and metals that do not seem to fit into the conventional scholarly view of animals and metals in the New World. Two new study aids prepared by John L. Sorenson and available through F.A.R.M.S. provide information that will help students of the Book of Mormon examine and perhaps resolve these problems.

The Foreign Earth: An Exercise In Speculative Biology, Aidyn Ruf

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Speculative Biology is the practice of examining hypothetical scenarios about the potential evolution of life. This project explores one such perspective timeline, utilizing scientific illustration, scientific information, and creative writing to estimate what the organisms of Earth might look like 250 million years into the future. Basic parameters were established, examining our current knowledge about geology and the environment to determine how the Earth itself might look. This included examining factors such as tectonic movement, adjusted ocean currents, and planetary heat cycles. Then, I studied mass extinctions and the animals which survived them, creating a baseline of ancestors the future …

The Mouse Colony, Katerina Tsiopos

Animal Studies Journal

The Mouse Colony

Tender Creatures, Chloe Joy Raizner

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Tender Creatures is a manifestation of my childhood. I was never quite like my peers. I lived in an abusive household, and had undiagnosed ADHD, OCD, and overall crushing anxiety. I struggled to understand people. Animals, on the other hand, captivated me. I felt like I must have been an animal myself. Some sort of creature that knew only fight, flight, or stare intently. The creatures depicted in my artwork can be interpreted in some cases as a representation of me, and in other cases a representation of my abusers, and sometimes even both. After all, we can be our …

Can Animals Contract?, John Enman-Beech

Animal Studies Journal

Animals are, or are like persons, and so should not be treated as mere property. But persons are not just non-property; they are contractors. They interact with property and with other persons. This article analyses the possibilities for a range of animals to fit within market liberal society as contractors from a legal disciplinary perspective. Some animals are capable of contract-like relationships of reciprocal exchange, and can consent, in a certain sense, to parts of such relationships. However, the dangers of the contractual frame, which is used to legitimate exploitation, may exceed the benefits. Some scholars have begun to explore …

Picturizing Animals In The Arabic, Persian And Turkish - Azerbaijani Proverbs: A Comparative Study, Kubra Jabbarli

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

Animals have a special place in human thought and life throughout history since they were used as a symbol to refer to different purposes in stories and proverbs. So, they play an important role in the people's culture and literature. Thus, animal behaviors and characteristics were not the same for all nations due to the geographic nature of each nation, the impact of animals' in it, and to the beliefs, customs and traditions of each nation.From this standpoint, we found that there were many common beliefs among nations regarding animals and their behaviors. At the same time, we found that …

Animals In Javanese Manuscript Illustrations, Dick Van Der Meij

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Most Javanese manuscript illustrations of narrative poems and (pseudo)-historical chronicles (babad) depict only one part of the natural world: animals. Animals are portrayed in relation to the characters in the text they illustrate. Some illustrated Javanese manuscripts are discussed below in relation to the way in which they illustrate the natural world: these are the fictive narrative poems Serat Selarasa, Serat Panji Jayakusuma, Serat Asmarasupi, Serat Jayalengkara Wulang, and Serat Damar Wulan, and the poetic (pseudo)-historical chronicle Babad Perang Demak. It appears from the illustrations in the manuscripts discussed that in the narrative poems the wayang style is preferred and …

American Horse Power During The Great War, Hanna K. Lipsey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation charts the significant, if understudied, history of American horses during the era of World War I, from roughly 1914 to 1919. Its chapters trace how the US Army acquired, used, cared for, and ultimately demobilized horses over the course of that conflict. Beginning with their acquisition, via either an Army Horse Breeding Program or a complicated buying process, horses faced a complex introduction into military service. Life for these animals did not get any easier once they reached the European front. Although the US military was beginning to replace horses with motor trucks and tractors, horses remained central …

Fictitious Ecology, Paulina Zuckerman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis project, The Mountain Fog, is a children’s picture book pitch that tells a light-hearted story of two dogs who must face an environmental disaster. In this accompanying critical essay, I break down the process of crafting a fictional relationship between author-illustrator, animal characters, and the environment. It begins through the context of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” which identifies seeing the world through two lenses - the Primary world and the Secondary world. From these terms, I navigate the idea of a fictitious ecology, an encapsulated anthropomorphic world governed by the creator’s personal experience with nature. This …

Nurture: A Campaign About Animal Adoption In The Philippines Through Digital Illustrations, Julianne P. Chuah

DLSU Senior High School Research Congress

This paper focuses on animal adoption in the Philippines and how art can influence people to support this action. Animal adoption is not given much attention in the country, and certain stigmas are surrounding such topics. Additionally, some people prefer to choose the breed of their pet, so they would instead buy from a breeder or a pet store rather than adopting one. This causes shelters to overpopulate with animals, ultimately resulting in the euthanization of some animals. This research aims to normalize animal adoption through art—in the form of a campaign. The paper also connects utilitarianism to adoption in …

Christian Asceticism, David Allen Osb

Obsculta

The experience of the desert and wildlife was one of the hallmarks of early Christian monasticism. This paper offers a few vignettes about how animals and the natural world influenced the spirituality and writing of the ascetic life of early Christian monastics.

Six-Bullets Faith, Justin R. Lazor

ETD Archive

At a religious school of unspecified denomination—but definitely NOT Catholic—two women fall in love. One of them has a chainsaw, the other a gun. There’s also a horny parrot, a horny pastor and a senile mother, not to mention Lucifer, who is a bit of a teenage girl and a HUGE Billie Eilish fan. And the end of the Universe is coming, FYI, via the Big Rip, so there’s that too. And this play is also about addiction and withdrawal and recovery and the capacity or incapacity for love to overcome forces that can overwhelm the self.

The Nature Of Persons And Our Ethical Relations With Nonhuman Animals, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

If we accept that at least some kinds of nonhuman animals are persons, a variety of paradoxes emerge in our ethical relations with them, involving apparently unavoidable disrespect of their personhood. We aim to show that these paradoxes are legitimate but can be illuminatingly resolved in the light of an adequate understanding of the nature of persons. Drawing on recent Western, Daoist, and Zen Buddhist thought, we argue that personhood is already paradoxical in the same way as these aspects of our ethical relations with nonhuman animals, and in fact is the source of their paradoxical character. In both contexts, …

Mutual Rescue: Disabled Animals And Their Caretakers, Lynda Birke, Lori Gruen

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals.

Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …

Human Nature, Mary Robb

Master's Theses

Human Nature explores my personal observations and life experiences through the use of my narrative ceramic sculptures. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics or behaviors to non-human entities, such as animals. Some animals are more desirable than others, but all have value and purpose. They exist for a reason. They all bleed. They just want to be. People are like that. I became untrusting of humans after a childhood trauma and began relating more to animals than humans. I observed many similarities in wild animals with my experience. They are continually on alert searching for food and watching for …

Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom And The Alleged Incontinence Of Female Speech, Mary C. Flannery

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In a passage from The Castle of Perseverance, the reprehensible Malus Angelus dismisses the speech of the personified virtues who are attempting to lead mankind to salvation: ‘Ther wymmen arn, are many wordys. (…) Ther ges syttyn are many tordys’ (2649-51). As the quotation illustrates, likening someone’s words to turds is both an effective brush-off and a colourful insult. This particular insult derives its force from the familiar anti-feminist trope of the voluble woman: like women, the wicked angel implies, the female personifications of virtue talk too much, and the incontinence of their speech is presented in terms that …

Animals And The Predator Motif In Dracula, Mary Ray

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

In Bram Stoker's Dracula, animals are used to reflect the ferocity of the titular villain. A variety of animals are used, including wolves and bats, which have now become part of vampire lore. At one point in the novel, Dracula even uses a human to fulfill his bidding. However, as dangerous as a man is, Dracula is more powerful and sinister predator. He is defeated only when multiple men band together with a plan to kill him. The first instance of fearsome animals occurs at the very beginning of the novel, when Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania. Right at …

Feminist Ethicality In Child-Animal Research: Worlding Through Complex Stories, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Mindy Blaise

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Thinking with feminist scholarship on ethicality, this article draws from two ethnographies with animal and young children to outline new questions for doing research in children’s geographies. Specifically, the article discusses how feminist ethicality within multispecies research challenges the masculinist idea that ethical research should focus on children’s story-making and ability to make meaning of the world. Instead, the authors call for an ethical focus on worlding processes or the making of worlds, and to seek possibilities for recuperation in the midst of children and more-than-human relations. The article concludes by reconfiguring the relations between ethics and research with young …

Human Identity, Animal Identity, And Reflective Endorsement, Rachel D. Robison-Greene

Between the Species

In this paper, I will argue that philosophers have overestimated the value of reflective endorsement. Introspection does not, as many philosophers have supposed, shine a searchlight on a person’s authentic identity. Our “selves” are not as transparent to us as we would like to think. In fact, much of the work done in an introspective mood is confabulation or rationalization rather than genuine self-discovery. I will argue that if this is the case, the outputs of the reflective endorsement process are not inherently normative in the way that thinkers like Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgaard have suggested.

If this is …

Empathy, Animals, And Deadly Vices, Kathie Jenni

Animal Studies Journal

In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor provides a secular analysis of vices which in Christian theology were thought to bring death to the soul: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. She argues that these vices are appropriately singled out and grouped together in that ‘they are destructive of the self and prevent its flourishing’. Using a related approach, I offer a secular analysis of gluttony and cowardice, examining their roles in common failures to empathise with animals. I argue that these vices constitute serious moral failings, for they enable continuing complicity in animal abuse and undermine integrity. While Taylor …

Lizard Brained, Miles Fowlkes Thomas

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Going Back Through, Cassandra Rae Lee

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

These are poems from between 2018 and 221 during which time the author continuously sought out romance, rearranged the furniture , and adopted animals. Amidst this unresolve, primary preoccupations were closeness, what we accrue+conceal, and the forces that guide poems into arrangement. Secondary preoccupations were dust, amnesia, distraction, conduits, and the seething junction of forces where contradiction can be held.