Abstract
We feed a bird, hold a kitten, walk our dog, and watch the magic happen—unseeing eyes and indifferent stares are miraculously transformed into friendly looks. Our desire to be face to face with animals is so apparent, so personal, and at the same time so vague that it raises a multitude of questions about the relationship between humans and animals, questions that seem as pressing as they are unanswerable. What is this fascination that makes people flock to see a pig named Babe or a pair of pandas? What makes us come back again and again to the zoo, that sad “monument to the impossibility of animal encounters,”1 in order to catch the eye of the tiger behind bars—what are we hoping for?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1980), 19.
Akira Mizuta Lippitt, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6.
Steve Baker, The Postmodern World (London: Reaktion, 2000), 20.
Wendy Wheeler, A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature, and Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 17.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinventing of Nature (New York.— Routledge, 1991), 12.
Helene Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 99.
R. Lane Kauffmann, “The Other in Question: Dialogical Experiments in Montaigne, Kafka, and Cortazar,” in Tullio Maranhao, ed., The Interpretation of Dialogue, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),181.
Bob Marvin and Garry Mullan, ed., Zoo Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 3.
Will McNeill, Heidegger: Visions: Of Animals, Others and the Divine (Warwick: Warwick University Press, 1993), 26.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Ark, 1984), 41.
Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 116–119.
Copyright information
© 2005 Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ittner, J. (2005). Who’s Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector. In: Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09411-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09411-7_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6512-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-09411-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)