American Roadkill

American Roadkill PDF Author: Don H. Corrigan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147668443X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Slaughtered along our highways, roadkill may be observed regularly, but aren't likely to be given much thought. Research scientists, animal rights activists, roadkill artists, writers, ethicists and lyricists, however, are increasingly sounding the alarm. They report that we are killing the very animals we love, and are driving many of them to the brink of extinction. Detailing the death and destruction of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insect pollinators, this study examines the ways in which we are thus jeopardizing our own futures. Beginning in the Model T era, biologists counted the common carnage of the time--cottontails, woodchucks, and squirrels, mostly. That record-keeping continues today. Beyond the bleak statistics, zoologists are rerouting migratory paths of animals and are advocating for cat and dog companions. This book illuminates both our successes and failures in keeping animals out of harm's way and what those efforts reflect about ourselves and our capacity to care enough to alter the road ahead.

Cinematic Canines

Cinematic Canines PDF Author: Adrienne L. McLean
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813563565
Category : Dogs in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of "man's best friends" (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century. The representation and visualization of dogs in cinema, as of other animals, has influenced our understanding of what dogs "should" do and be, for us and with us. Adrienne L. McLean expertly shepherds these original essays into a coherent look at "real" dogs in live-action narrative films, from the stars and featured players to the character and supporting actors to those pooches that assumed bit parts or performed as extras. Who were those dogs, how were they trained, what were they made to do, how did they participate as characters in a fictional universe? These are a just a few of the many questions that she and the outstanding group of scholars in this book have addressed. Often dogs are anthropomorphized in movies in ways that enable them to reason, sympathize, understand and even talk; and our shaping of dogs into furry humans has had profound effects on the lives of dogs off the screen. Certain breeds of dog have risen in popularity following their appearance in commercial film, often to the detriment of the dogs themselves, who rarely correspond to their idealized screen versions. In essence, the contributors in Cinematic Canines help us think about and understand the meanings of the many canines that appear in the movies and, in turn, we want to know more about those dogs due in no small part to the power of the movies themselves.

American Roadkill

American Roadkill PDF Author: Don H. Corrigan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147668443X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Slaughtered along our highways, roadkill may be observed regularly, but aren't likely to be given much thought. Research scientists, animal rights activists, roadkill artists, writers, ethicists and lyricists, however, are increasingly sounding the alarm. They report that we are killing the very animals we love, and are driving many of them to the brink of extinction. Detailing the death and destruction of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insect pollinators, this study examines the ways in which we are thus jeopardizing our own futures. Beginning in the Model T era, biologists counted the common carnage of the time--cottontails, woodchucks, and squirrels, mostly. That record-keeping continues today. Beyond the bleak statistics, zoologists are rerouting migratory paths of animals and are advocating for cat and dog companions. This book illuminates both our successes and failures in keeping animals out of harm's way and what those efforts reflect about ourselves and our capacity to care enough to alter the road ahead.

Brute Force

Brute Force PDF Author: Dominic Lennard
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438476620
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema's many bad beasts.

Animal Narratology

Animal Narratology PDF Author: Joela Jacobs
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039283480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.

Pet Projects

Pet Projects PDF Author: Elizabeth Young
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In Pet Projects, Elizabeth Young joins an analysis of the representation of animals in nineteenth-century fiction, taxidermy, and the visual arts with a first-person reflection on her own scholarly journey. Centering on Margaret Marshall Saunders, a Canadian woman writer once famous for her animal novels, and incorporating Young’s own experience of a beloved animal’s illness, this study highlights the personal and intellectual stakes of a “pet project” of cultural criticism. Young assembles a broad archive of materials, beginning with Saunders’s novels and widening outward to include fiction, nonfiction, photography, and taxidermy. She coins the term “first-dog voice” to describe the narrative technique of novels, such as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, written in the first person from the perspective of an animal. She connects this voice to contemporary political issues, revealing how animal fiction such as Saunders’s reanimates nineteenth-century writing about both feminism and slavery. Highlighting the prominence of taxidermy in the late nineteenth century, she suggests that Saunders transforms taxidermic techniques in surprising ways that provide new forms of authority for women. Young adapts Freud to analyze literary representations of mourning by and for animals, and she examines how Canadian writers, including Saunders, use animals to explore race, ethnicity, and national identity. Her wide-ranging investigation incorporates twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century works of literature and culture, including recent art using taxidermy and contemporary film. Throughout, she reflects on the tools she uses to craft her analyses, examining the state of scholarly fields from feminist criticism to animal studies. With a lively, first-person voice that highlights experiences usually concealed in academic studies by scholarly discourse—such as detours, zigzags, roadblocks, and personal experience—this unique and innovative book will delight animal enthusiasts and academics in the fields of animal studies, gender studies, American studies, and Canadian studies.

Horror Dogs

Horror Dogs PDF Author: Brian Patrick Duggan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476685878
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds--sometimes even fluffy lapdogs. With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes--the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."

The Films of Aki Kaurismäki

The Films of Aki Kaurismäki PDF Author: Thomas Austin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150132540X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Despite creating an extensive and innovative body of work over the last 30 years, Aki Kaurismäki remains relatively neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This international collection of original essays aims to redress such neglect by assembling diverse critical inquiries into Kaurismäki's oeuvre. The first anthology on Kaurismäki to be published in English, it offers a range of voices responding to his politically and aesthetically compelling cinema. Deploying various methodologies to explore multiple facets of his work, The Films of Aki Kaurismäki will come to be seen as the definitive book on Kaurismäki.

Animals in Narrative Film and Television

Animals in Narrative Film and Television PDF Author: Karin Beeler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666904821
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book explores fictional representations and narrative functions of animal characters in animated and live-action film and television, examining the ways in which these representations intersect with a variety of social issues. Contributors cover a range of animal characters, from heroes to villains, across a variety of screen genres and formats, including anime, comedy, romance, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Aesthetic features of these works, along with the increased latitude that fictionalized narratives and alternative worlds provide, allow existing social issues to be brought to the forefront in order to effect change in our societies. By incorporating animal figures into media, these screen narratives have gained the ability to critique actions carried out by human beings and explore dimensions of both the human/animal connection and the intersectionality of race, culture, class, gender, and ability, ultimately teaching viewers how to become more human in our interactions with the world around us. Scholars of film studies, media studies, and animal studies will find this book of particular interest.

Free Market Dogs

Free Market Dogs PDF Author: Michał Piotr Pręgowski
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN:
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What has changed in the last twenty-five years in the relationship of Poles with their dogs? How have the free market and capitalism influenced Poland and the human-canine bond there? Are dogs “property,” “friends,” or “members of the family” in post-communist Poland? Free Market Dogs, edited by Michał Piotr Pręgowski and Justyna Włodarczyk, examines the interactions and relationships of dogs and humans in contemporary Polish culture and society, and explores how Poland’s intense exposure to Western—and particularly American—cultural patterns influenced the status of dogs after restoration of democracy in 1989. This book discusses topics such as the emergence of pet cemeteries, dog memoirs, and presidential dogs in Poland; the growing popularity of dog sports and the feminization of said sports; the philosophical and ideological changes in dog training caused by exposure to state-of-the-art methods from American books and videos; dogs in contemporary Polish art; and the specificity and growing pains of local pet-facilitated therapy. Free Market Dogs was written by researchers and practitioners whose academic background includes sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, cultural studies, and literary studies, and whose practical experience involves either training dogs or working with them. Based on thorough research and personal expertise, this is a great book for anyone interested in human-canine relationships—and their similarities and differences—around the world.

General Custer, Libbie Custer and Their Dogs

General Custer, Libbie Custer and Their Dogs PDF Author: Brian Patrick Duggan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476669546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
General George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie Custer, were wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of his death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of 40 hunting dogs, including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds and Foxhounds. Told from a dog owner's perspective, this biography covers their first dogs during the Civil War and in Texas; hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers; entertaining tourist buffalo hunters, including a Russian Archduke, English aristocrats and P. T. Barnum (all of whom presented the general with hounds); Custer's attack on the Washita village (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs); and the 7th Cavalry's march to Little Bighorn with an analysis of rumors about a Last Stand dog. The Custers' pack was re-homed after his death in the first national dog rescue effort. Well illustrated, the book includes an appendix giving depictions of the Custers' dogs in art, literature and film.