Animals, technology, and the zoopoetics of American modernism

This dissertation addresses a striking paradox of American modernity: the historical disappearance of wildlife from the natural environment and the simultaneous proliferation of animal forms across the cultural landscape---in literature, in visual and material culture, and in popular scientific writings during the half-century of dramatic change from 1890 to 1940. Across these venues the figure of the "vanishing animal" emerges as a dominant trope, as modern extinctions and the explosion of machine culture combine to frame animals within a spectral logic---disappearing, but more visible than ever. The first half of this dissertation examines the extensive technological, ideological, and representational apparatus through which animals and animal life are rendered in modern American culture, while the second half explores a significant, if surprising, correlative phenomenon whereby the modernized figure of the animal returns to haunt, and in fact disrupt, the very technics that facilitated its emergence in the first place.Chapter One addresses the popular genre of the "realistic" wild animal story and the hunting narratives of Theodore Roosevelt, and identifies the figure of the vanishing animal as a significant trope linking a number of prominent Americans at the turn of the century. Chapter Two focuses more explicitly on the elaborate techne through which animals become nostalgia-laden images of the primitive, by examining Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon in the context of modern taxidermy, wildlife photography, and early nature films. Chapter Three shifts directions in order to explore the "primitive" behind, or within, modern technologies of communication. This chapter addresses the modern reconfiguration of "the animal" and its relation to both language and subjectivity through an examination of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Chapter Four continues this investigation of the animal's haunting presence within modernist cultural and aesthetic productions through a discussion of Val Lewton's classic 1942 film, Cat People. By employing the deconstructive notion of "spectrality" to read the zoopoetics of modernist texts, my goal is to open up cultural texts to their nonhuman other and in turn, to open up the larger nonhuman world to the force of the figurative--- letting zoon inform both our logos and our poeisis, and indeed, vice versa.