“VARADOS NO MAR OS CETÁCEOS E AS PALABRAS”. OS ANIMAIS NA POESÍA DO PRESTIGE
'Varados no mar os cetáceos e as palabras': Animals in the Poetry about Prestige

Author(s): María Xesús Nogueira Pereira
Subject(s): Cultural history, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Other Language Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Galician poetry; oil tanker Prestige; ecopoetry; ecocriticism; animals in literature
Summary/Abstract: The importance of the representation of animals in emerging textual modalities such as ecopoetry contrasts with the scarcity of studies on the subject, which, in the Galician case, may well extend - with some exceptions - to the whole of literature. The poetry that appeared in the months following the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige in November 2002 constitutes a textual corpus that serves to address the issue of the treatment of animals from the theoretical assumptions of ecocriticism, ecofeminism and studies that have blurred the boundaries between human and non-human animals. An analysis of the animal representation in texts about Prestige published at the end of 2002 and throughout 2003 reveals a continuum of approaches that lie between documentation and trope. The paper also establishes a typology of poetic attitudes that have in common the commitment to bear witness to and denounce the situation generated by the catastrophe: realistic representation, use of the animal for the construction of tropes, contiguity between species and between humans and non-humans, and de-animalisation.

• Details
• Contents