Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
43
result(s) for
"Dogs Behavior Fiction."
Sort by:
Dog in charge
When his human family goes to the store, Dog is left in charge of five wily cats.
Book
ANIMAL INDIVIDUALS: A PLEA FOR A NOMINALISTIC TURN IN ANIMAL STUDIES?
This paper focuses on the concept of \"animal individuals\" and puts forward a nominalistic approach. Nominalism is an ontological thesis (only individuals exist), but also an epistemological claim: that our \"nouns\" are practical tools for a quick dispatch of things, but do not correspond to anything real. Hence for a consistent nominalist, \"animals\" do not exist, except as a powerful fiction. First, we show that the word \"animal\" commits what we call (after Plato) the \"fallacy of the crane\": it encompasses a huge range of living entities that have only one thing in common: they are not humans. Differences between our term \"animal\" and the ancient Greek \"zoon\" also show the fluctuating boundaries of \"animality.\" Besides, our ways of speaking systematically deny individuality to nonhuman animals. The philosophical meaning of the term \"individual\" implies a genuine dimension of artistic singularity and a political claim for emancipation. Portraits of apes are striking instances of such individuality, captured by photography, as is art produced by particular animals. Methodologically, this leads also to the collection of anecdotes and a focus on animal biographies. The eighteenth-century controversy between Buffon and Condillac helps us understand what is at stake in the tension between species and individuals. Buffon claims that each nonhuman animal species can be represented by a \"specimen,\" whereas Condillac shows that animal individuals feel like us and that their nature is impenetrable to us. Finally, a focus on individuals is not only a way to renew or extend historical methods. Biologists are also increasingly concerned with individuals. They develop tools to distinguish individuals from one another: \"animal bertillonage\" for morphology. They question standard norms of behavior and preferences. This emphasis on animal individuality has not only theoretical but also ethical and legal consequences.
Journal Article
Security Bonds: On Feeling Power and the Fiction of an Animal Governmentality
According to Pease, state fantasies \"lay down the scenarios through which the state's rules and norms can be experienced as internal to the citizens' desire. According to Pease, the state fantasy of American exceptionalism operating between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the beginning of the War on Terror just over a decade later constituted a massive \"disavowal of imperialism\" by U.S. citizens who interiorized the rationale for imperial intervention, indeed affectively experienced it as a realization of their own will rather than as \"an imposi- tion of the state\" (23, 6). [...]it is crucial to consider that the workings of security might be positively aligned with an ethics of \"human-animal flourishing\" affirmed, among others, by Donna Haraway (53).11 Might not the ends of security be more optimally served by living beings who are free to realize their love-potentials than by those who are strictly obedient? In both fighting k9s and Welcome Home Dogs, animals can be seen working not strictly obediently or automatically, like Cartesian machines, but rather passionately, as companion subjects of feeling, in defense of Western liberal democratic life. Because sovereign violence tends to receive most critical attention in critiques of the U.S.-led War on Terror, it is important to juxtapose spring-coiled k9s with their seem- ingly benign, biopolitical doubles, the dogs that re-sensitize soldiers to civilian life.
Journal Article
Talking (for, with) Dogs: Science Fiction Breaks a Species Barrier
This article is part of my ongoing study of a figure I call the amborg, which represents the interface between species in a variety of ways. One way in which humans and other animals interact is through the attempt to communicate, and we try most sincerely, perhaps, in the human/dog relationship. This attempt is explored in a number of science fiction stories, where scientific extrapolation and subjunctive \"what if\" speculation allow us to overhear how that communication might occur. The result sometimes reflects genuine grappling with questions of authority, otherness, consciousness, and embodiment. Working with Gayatri Spivak's concept of the subaltern and Donna Haraway's companion species, but also the observations and conclusions of animal ethologists, I look at three sf works: Clifford Simak's City (1952), Sheri S. Tepper's The Companions (2003), and Kij Johnson's \"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change\" (2007). I explore ways in which sf allows writers to speculate on how species communicate, resulting in what Haraway might see as figurative interspecies epigenesis: not the speech of the subaltern, but speaking between \"alterns.\" To imagine this possibility is to break down one of the most common differentiations between the human (as unique possessor of language) and the separate, inferior category of animal, instead offering a more generous definition of language itself and a more observant description of the ways in which humans and other animal beings communicate with one another.
Journal Article
Don't need friends
After his best friend moves away, Rat rudely rebuffs the efforts of the other residents of the junkyard to be friendly, until he and a grouchy old dog decide that they need each other.
Book
This Is Play
Context is everything. Playing, exploring, artmaking, religion, literature, are not activities but contexts. Play is the way we encounter the multilayered nature of communication in humans and animals, in art forms and nature. Living beings learn to say as-if and sort-of; playing with these messages is the starting place of creativity, and one of the great primal life functions. Without play, learning and evolution are impossible. In the 1950s, Gregory Bateson elucidated how all this works and set the stage for innumerable insights into how messages like “this is play,” “this is art,” “this is science,” affect our understanding of what we see and hear, do and say. “This is play” can be our great opening into artistic and metaphoric activity, but such messages can also be perverted to manipulate us in innumerable ways. Levels of communication connect over, under, around and through each other. Mixtures and degrees of play, mixtures and degrees of friendship or romantic love—all these contexts, like the Klein bottle, have no inside and no outside, and are more intricate than any idea we can have of them. To be able to function in joy and freedom is the gift of play. We come to understand that not only is all communication inflected, but the inflection is the communication itself.
Journal Article
Jack at bat
Jack the rabbit serves as bat boy and Rex the dog helps in left field during a baseball game between the Lady City Ladies and the Big City Brats.
Book
