Panel #8 Session 2
Thursday 30 November - 14:30
Building 25, Room 2
Chair: Oscar Davis
Crafting Horse Umwelten: Equine Life-Worlds in Horse Narrative
- Alannah Mewes
University of the Sunshine Coast
An emerging trend in the field of human animal studies is debate over an animal’s perception of their own life and existence. Jakob von Uexküll addresses animal self-perception in Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934), employing the term umwelt, to evoke an “animal’s perceptual life-world” (Sagan 2) or “environments” (Uexküll 35). The concept of umwelten suggests that animals encounter different subjective worlds and perceive these worlds in their own distinctive sensorial and experiential ways. An understanding of Uexküll’s argument is that all animals – no matter how ‘simple’ or ‘complex’, are made meaningful and make meaning through their specific ways of perceiving and acting upon their worlds (Sagan 29). Literature, as a creative form, is a method by which nonhuman animal self-perception can be imagined. Horse narrative exemplars, like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1887) and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982) attempt to represent the umwelten of the horse from the narrator's equine perspective, are demonstrably supportive of animal rights and freedom from suffering, yet arguable fail to represent complex life-worlds due to their anthropomorphic characterisation. This paper discusses the deployment of concepts of umwelten and animal self-comprehension through narrative craft, considering how the domesticated horse might perceive their own life, and how that perception might be evoked authentically through narrative. This paper contributes to and extends literary debates on nonhuman umwelten in narrative, arguing that a move away from anthropomorphic storytelling is paramount to presenting a more agential horse story.
Alannah Mewes is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Horses and Heroines: human and equine agency in ecofeminist fiction’ focuses on the intersections between creative writing craft and human animal studies, forging new ways of storytelling and giving nonhuman animals a more distinct role and voice in narrative. She has had her creative work published in Social Alternatives magazine and spoke at the Equine History Collective conference hosted by Purdue University in 2022.
Tenderness as Methodology: Writing a red fox
- Clare Carlin
RMIT University
We live in a more-than-human world and in my creative practice I try to remember and think-with this reality. Yet many beings are not listened to: who gets heard? Foxes talk in sound, gesture, and scent. They are also ‘voiced’ by humans, in words and speech, sometimes with the umwelt of the animal in mind. My novel, Fox (Story), is an imaginative attempt to write Vulpes vulpes, the red fox. This writing, the practice-led research for my creative writing PhD, aims to destabilise the human in fiction. In this paper I examine the methods I have used to write fox, I reflect on what kind of methodology constitutes a sound approach to do this work, and I consider the implications of writing the beyond-human, and the (im)possibility of ‘becoming’ a fox in letters. Can I (should I?) translate fox? Is this endeavour destined to fail and does that matter? What might be realised through this writing?
Clare Carlin is a PhD candidate in creative writing at RMIT, a novelist and poet, and the founding editor of ongoing literature project Pieced Work.
Animals, Machines, and Machine-Animals: non-Human Influence on Human Creativity
- Sam Byrnand & Andi Stapp-Gaunt
University of Canberra
Davis and Demello write “[The] wild rabbit can teach us plenty about how we as humans can simultaneously love, hate and be totally ignorant about one species of animal, and how those opposite reactions can lead to wildly contradictory human behaviours” (2003:3). In this presentation, Sam Byrnand and Andi Stapp-Gaunt will explore stories they have made with material and virtual rabbits that are unusual and contradictory.
Andi’s practice-led research explores how ‘compost writing’ (Haraway 2016) emerges when storying partners ‘render each other capable in actual encounters’ (Haraway 2016:127). Using an indoor pet fence as a figure to think with, Andi demonstrates how she has made poetry with companion rabbits.
Sam is building digital home spaces for the Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) who perform in his games, and has discovered that the (digital) pet rabbits he has provided are becoming the subject of much agitation in the web-based suburb of Concord. Sam's visual narrative style will provide the foundation to his discussion on extra-narrative representations of human/non-human relationships between NPCs in gaming, and the influences these peripheral considerations can exert on the development experience.
Sam Byrnand is not an AI. He composes music and develops narratives and designs games alongside AI and maintains a quiet optimism about the potential for creative relationships between humans and non-humans. Sam’s current focus is the gamification of education, specifically producing prototypes for playable/interactive narratives that act as introductory thought experiments in ethics, targeting moral philosophy and law and justice students.
Andraya Stapp-Gaunt is a Māori-Dutch woman, secondary English teacher, and PhD candidate at the University of Canberra, Faculty of Arts and Design. Her writing is a thought experiment in ‘making stories’ with rabbits using feminist multispecies theory (Haraway 2016) and Indigenous epistemology (Yunkaporta 2019). Through processes of ‘becoming-with’ and ‘making-with’ rabbits, Andraya strives to foreground the role of human and nonhuman connectedness in processes of creativity. Andraya lives with five companion house rabbits who are her kin. She is writing a novel (with rabbits) called Rabbit Island.
Fact, fiction and form: writing biographical poetry about poets
- Sarah-Jane Burton
Australian National University
Biographical poetry is a genre that draws on the lives of historical figures, with the aim of exploring their personal, cultural and social contexts through verse. Biographical poetry written about poets themselves offers us a way to explore poetic practice and the tangible existence of poets in a way that other biographical forms simply cannot. We can examine the contributions made to literary history by poets in deep and meaningful ways in this kind of writing, replicating, reimagining and respecting poets' original works alongside their lives. In this paper I will be examining my use of biographical poetry about poets in my own creative practice and the challenges I've encountered when engaging with this genre including ethical and aesthetic complications and the choices that need to be made regarding fact, fiction and form.
Sarah-Jane Burton is currently working as the Official Historian for the New England Poetry Club in Boston, Massachusetts and her research has been funded internationally by several universities. In 2019, she was a Research Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard and she has also been the recipient of an Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University and a Dissertation Grant from the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Harvard. She has served in both academic and professional roles in the tertiary sector, including in the English department at Macquarie University, Sydney and the Library division of Western Sydney University, having previously worked as a journalist and a communications executive, with research published and presented in both academic and mainstream media channels. Sarah-Jane is a postdoctoral research fellow and is the Graduate Attribute Lead, Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, at the Australian National University in Canberra.