Post-Koin� Studies of Non-Anthropocentric (Poetic) Languages

by Anita Jarzyna

Overview

In this book you will come across an authorial formula of extrahuman community and communication. The formula includes languages polemical with the narrow model of community that often excludes certain human and non-human beings. Alternative languages are sensitive to the codes of violence directed against animals so as to inclusively create a new interspecies non-antagonistic collectivity. What especially seeks such alternative languages is poetry. It not only represents the true character of existing relationships with animals or determines their shape but also can interfere in them, suspend the control of logocentric order, and, as a result, reduce the ambiguous human guardianship over animals that, in turn, requires the verification and questioning of the guardianship’s position in language. This publication treats Polish poetry as a statement equal with—if not precursory for—the discursive calls for the abolition of anthropocentric dominance. The book proves that critical reflection on the language that consolidates the community redefines our attitude toward animals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004722002
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/25/2025
Series:	Human-Animal Studies , #30
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Anita Jarzyna (1984), associate professor at the University of Łodz and lecturer at the Faculty of Artes Liberales of the University of Warsaw. Polish literary researcher. Her main field of interests are poetry, ecocriticism, animal studies and Holocaust studies. Author of three books and several essays.

Table of Contents

Acronyms

1 Introduction

Part 1: In Other Words

2 Introduction to the Post-Koiné

3 Who Are We and Who Are They? Notes about One Poem

4 Children and Fish (Poems Read in Voices)

Part 2: States of Exception, Status Quo

5 The Massacre of Istanbul Dogs (1911) and the Armenian Genocide (1915): Forgotten Crimes

6 Through the Skin: about One Poem by Nelly Sachs

7 Judenjagd / Jew Hunt: Semantics and Diagnoses

8 Szlemiels: Animals in the Light of the Holocaust in Polish Children’s Literature

9 “The Life of Birds and Mammals After”: the Holocaust Imaginarium in Post-Anthropocentric Poetry after 1989

Part 3: Customs

10 Heresies: Restoration of Sensitivity (Tadeusz Nowak and Jerzy Nowosielski)

11 Jerzy Ficowski’s and Tadeusz Nowak’s: the Species We Eat

12 Freedom Will Say: “Blood”

13 Female Abjects: Reading Justyna Bargielska and Joanna Mueller
 1 Motherhood’s Kittens
 2 Litters
 3 Acephaly
 4 Apoptosis
 5 Pomiot: between the Subject and the Abject
 6 Female Poem

14 Laika’s Lullabies: Post-Anthropocentric Representations of the First Dog in Space

15 Outside the Law: about a Poem by Jerzy Kronhold

Part 4: The Common World: Beginning Anew

16 Ornithology, Ornithomancy: Sokołowski and Jerzy Ficowski’s (Other) Birds

17 Translating from the Ornithological: on the Work of Michał Książek

18 Varieties of Delight

19 As Buddies (Piotr Sommer)

20 Conclusion: Post-Koiné Tropes
Bibliography
Index