Proper to Animals: Negotiating Cross-Species Entanglements in Contemporary German Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The central claim in philosophy and popular thought invoked to differentiate humans from animals is that animals live in a state of privation. Thinkers who subscribe to this notion postulate the existence of traits proper to humans that other Earthly species not only cannot possess but are ‘lacking’. This line of thought is termed human exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism posits the existence of a seemingly insurmountable divide between humans and all life on Earth. In response, my dissertation explores an emergent sensibility in German and English-language literature that appears to dispute the exclusivity of traits otherwise attributed to humans. Breaking with the anthropocentric philosophical tradition, I draw upon Matthew Calarco’s indistinction approach to animal studies, allowing animals to possess traits such as language, futurity, and death. To avow the possibility of non-human language, my research marries two distinct definitions of ‘zoopoetics,’ the latter offering a theoretical lens currently emerging in literary animal studies. I do so as a means to first examine qualities of attentiveness displayed by the human protagonist in Norbert Scheuer’s novel Die Sprache der Vögel. I then utilize Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic framework to interpret his ensuing novel Winterbienen to support my argument that honeybees possess futurity, as evidenced by their capacity to engage in worldmaking. Building on research in deconstructionism and posthumanism, my ensuing analyses of the collaborative short story “Wolfsjäger” authored by Christoph Ransmayr and of Martin Pollack and Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter aim to concretize the absences left by animal deaths to suggest that nonhuman life bears equivocal meaning and significance as human life. My dissertation further tabulates the transformations that emerge within literary narratives when human characters embrace the possibility that animals possess traits otherwise attributed solely to humans. The most crucial change to emerge is the shedding of human exceptionalism and the forging of kinships with other animals to reintegrate ourselves among our newfound compatriots. With Ulrike Draesner’s Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt, Karen Joy Fowler’s We’re Completely Beside Ourselves, and Bettina Suleiman’s Auswilderung, I sketch three possible forms that human relationships with other animals can take when we acknowledge shared traits across species lines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".