Song Seminar - Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting

Wednesday 21 November, 12.30-2 pm in Emmanuel College (Harrods Room)

Naomi Weiss (Harvard) – 'Performance, Memory, and Affect: Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting'

In this presentation I explore how ancient Greek images of choral song and dance—activities unified in the term choreia—engage a viewer's experience of musical performance. I focus in particular on a series of Attic pots, mostly from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals and animal-riders singing and dancing, usually to the accompaniment of a double pipe (the aulos). These pots are often assumed to be "proto-comic," appearing at the same time as dramatic festivals were developing at Athens. Rather than seeing them as records of particular theatrical scenes, I suggest that we should understand them as expansive and flexible in terms of the songs they convey: they can reproduce the phenomenology of an entire production as well as that of one moment within it; they can also suggest affinities to other performances of choreia, thus drawing on a broader choral repertoire. By evoking the multisensory, multilayered experience of theater, these vessels position their users as audience members once more. At the same time, by cueing a viewer's embodied memory of being a choral performer himself, they can draw him into participating in their own musical productions.

Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Research Seminar

This term's first meeting of the English Faculty's 18th-Century and Romantic Studies seminar will take place on Thursday 18th October at 5pm in the Board Room, Faculty of English. Professor Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University) will speak on the subject, '"Deem our nation brutes no longer": Animals, Affect, and Abolitionism". A synopsis of his paper follows below. All are welcome.

Slavery has been considered brutalising since ancient times, and throughout history observers have routinely compared enslaved people with captive or domesticated animals. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century plantation manuals described the management of enslaved people in the same terms as that of farmyard animals, explicitly offering advice on the husbandry of 'Negroes, horses, mules, and cattle'. Such comparisons may have been acceptable to colonial planters, but many metropolitan readers found them shocking. From the 1780s to the 1830s, campaigners, many influenced by the then fashionable discourses of sensibility, worked to abolish slavery and also to alleviate cruelty to animals. From Thomas Day, who combined antislavery and anti-bull-baiting passages in his novel Sandford and Merton (1784-9) to William Cowper, who wrote extensively on both slavery and animals, to William Wilberforce, the abolitionist and co-founder of the RSPCA, campaigners increasingly asked the British public to sympathise with both slaves and animals. By simultaneously working to advance the boundaries of sympathy to include both enslaved Africans and domesticated animals, campaigners certainly promoted freedom and alleviated suffering, but there was a cost. Conflating the two issues ran the risk of perpetuating racial ideologies that ultimately entrenched rather than challenged the notion of a hierarchy of races. This paper explores this phenomenon by reading a wide range of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literature concerned with both slavery and the anti-bull-baiting debate, including Day and Cowper but also the lesser known Percival Stockdale and Elizabeth Heyrick.

Suggested reading: Most of the texts cited in this talk are rather obscure, but it should be easy enough to locate: William Cowper, 'Charity', lines 83–244 and William Cowper, 'The Negro's Complaint'. The bull-baiting passages in Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, should also be relatively easy to track down on ECCO. Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton, A Work Intended for the Use of Children, (1783–89), 8th edn, 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1798), II, pp. 290–308 and III, pp. 279-80. For passages on whaling, see II, 180–88.

Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University, Vice-President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland. He is the author of From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761 (Yale University Press, 2012) and British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) as well as several editions and edited collections, most recently an edition of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative for the Oxford University Press World's Classics series. His forthcoming works include a monograph, Unnatural Empire: Slavery, Abolition, and Colonial Natural History, 1650–1840, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2019, and an edited collection, Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840, forthcoming from Palgrave in 2020.

Call for essays: 'Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out'

'The boundary between the animal and the human has long been unstable, especially since the Victorian period. Where the boundary is drawn between human and animal is itself an expression of political power and dominance, and the "animal" can at once express the deepest fears and greatest aspirations of a society' (Victorian Animal Dreams, 4).

'The animal, like the ghost or good or evil spirit with which it is often associated, has been a manifestation of the uncanny' (Timothy Clark, 185).

In the mid nineteenth-century Charles Darwin published his theories of evolution. And as Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay suggest, 'The effect of Darwin's ideas was both to make the human more animal and the animal more human, destabilizing boundaries in both directions' (Victorian Animal Dreams, 2). Nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the 'animal within' with texts like R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau. In these novels the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. This was our animal-other associated with the id: passions, appetites and capable of a complete disregard for all taboos and any restraint. As Cyndy Hendershot states, this 'animal within' 'threatened to usurp masculine rationality and return man to a state of irrational chaos' (The Animal Within, 97). This however, relates the animal to the human in a very specific, anthropocentric way. Non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters too, and even before Darwin humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals. Rats, horses, dogs, cats, birds and other beasts have, as Donna Haraway puts it, a way of 'looking back' at us (When Species Meet,19).

Animals of all sorts have an entirely different and separate life to humans and in fiction this often morphs into Gothic horror. In these cases it is not about the 'animal within' but rather the animal 'with-out'; Other and entirely incomprehensible. These non-human, uncanny creatures know things we do not, and they see us in a way it is impossible for us to see ourselves. We have other sorts of encounters with animals too: we eat animals, imbibing their being in a largely non-ritualistic, but possibly still magical way; and on occasion, animals eat us. From plague-carrying rats, to 'filthy' fleas, black dogs and killer bunnies, animals of all sorts invade our imaginations, live with us (invited or not) in our homes, and insinuate themselves into our lives. The mere presence of a cat can make a home uncanny. An encounter with a dog on a deserted road at night can disconcert. The sight of a rat creeping down an alley carries all sorts of connotations as does a cluster of fat, black flies at the window of a deserted house. To date though, there is little written about animals and the Gothic, although they pervade our fictions, imaginations and sometimes our nightmares.

This collection is intended to look at all sorts of animals in relation to the Gothic: beasts, birds, sea-creatures, insects and domestic animals. We are not looking for transformative animals – no werewolves this time – rather we want essays on fictions about actual animals that explore their relation to the Gothic; their importance and prominence within the Gothic. We invite abstracts for essays that cover all animal/bird/insect/fish life forms, from all periods (from the early Modern to the present), and within different types of media – novels, poetry, short stories, films and games.


Topics may include (but are not bound by):

Rats (plague and death)
Dogs (black and otherwise)
Killer bunnies
Uncanny cats
Wolves
Alien sea creatures
Horses
Bulls
Cows (perhaps with long teeth)
Killer frogs
Snakes
Toads
Worms
Birds
Whales/Dolphins
Beetles, flies, ants, spiders
Animals as marginalised and oppressed
Animals in peril
Animal and human intimacies and the breaking of taboos
Exotic animals/animals in colonial regions (Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India)
Demonic animals
Dangerous animals (rabid dogs, venomous snakes)
Invasive animals
Animals and disease
Domestic animals
Uncanny animals
Animals connected to supernatural beings (Satanic goats, vampire bats)
Witchcraft and familiar spirits/animal guides
Rural versus urban animals
Sixth sense and psychic energy


Please send 500 word abstracts and a short bio note by 1 November 2017 to: Dr Ruth Heholt (ruth.heholt@falmouth.ac.uk) and Dr Melissa Edmundson (me.makala@gmail.com).


The collection is intended for the Palgrave MacMillan 'Studies in Animals and Literature' series. Completed essays must be submitted by 1 July 2018.