Animal outtakes: Media studies and narrative ethology

Susan Bridget McHugh, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to develop a “narrative ethology,” a theory that accounts for transformations of images of animals into animal subjectivities in modern and contemporary narratives. The project proceeds from an overlooked connection: animals in twentieth-century narratives have changed from naturalistic emblems to nonhuman agents. How do these shifting images of the animal intersect with the changing narratives of social agency? By connecting the development of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior, with the widespread circulation of photographic technologies, the present study argues that animal images are central to the production of narratives of animals as historical subjects, as both capable of expression and capable of being understood by humans. Through this textual transformation, animal narratives frame questions of agency more broadly in terms of social groups, rather than individuals, offering crucial sites for investigating how human anxieties about species boundaries rest within larger questions of representation. Tracing the interdisciplinary implications of recent literary, scientific, and cultural critiques of the subject, chapters focus on the development of a narrative ethology by exploring a variety of topics, genres, and texts—gendered and nationalized intimacy in girl-horse romances, racial marking and animal masking in ape-man stories, interspecific (between species) imaging and replication in dog-breeding tales, and technologies of the collective subject in barnyard fables.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dienst, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|Motion Pictures|Womens studies|Cultural anthropology

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