Session: 1c
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.09
Chair: Robert McKay
Camilla Hougaard (Aarhus University), “‘A pig transport is on fire on the E45 highway’: An Industrial Slaughter Pig’s Ambiguous Revolt in Nath Krause’s Trilogi (2025)”
Abstract: In recent years, Danish literature has become increasingly entangled with agriculture: a publisher has turned farmer, and a growing body of nature writing and fiction now places farming at its thematic center. This literary turn does not merely document rural life as endangered, as the tradition often has, but instead portrays agriculture as a site of imaginative potential.
Contemporary Danish literature continues the literary negotiation of agriculture initiated by Rachel Carson’s depiction of “man’s war against nature,” situating it within today’s political struggles over soil, food production, and the futures of shared land.
This paper explores Nath Krause’s poetry collection Trilogi (2025), in which an industrial pig flees into a field from a transport truck en route to slaughter. Yet contrary to the expectations of a classic escape narrative, the pig’s free life proves impossible. Here, caught in “this short time between ripening and harvest” (25), she longs for her mother in the industrial production and for the artificial soy feed she was raised on.
I will investigate how Krause collapses conventional distinctions between nature/agriculture, human mother/pig mother and care/industry and instead foregrounds their entangled interdependencies through a semantic ambiguity. Furthermore, I will examine how this strategy – considered alongside the pig’s complex emotional apparatus – may serve to nuance the idea of animals as “poor in world” (Heidegger 1929/1930).
Drawing on Jane Bennett’s call to establish new “[…] regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies, and propositions” (Bennett 2010, 108), this paper will emphasize how Trilogi weaves industrial animal farming and poetic sensibility together, offering new (piggy) perspectives on modern, industrialized Danish agriculture.
Bio: Camilla Hougaard is a PhD student at Aarhus University, where she researches contemporary Danish agricultural literature through an ecocritical lens. Her project investigates how literary texts reconfigure the entanglements between soil, animals, and humans, and she explores how these works might foster a more nuanced debate on sustainable land use. Alongside her academic work, she is a writer and co-editor in the Scandinavian literary magazine Vagant.
Ben Lomas (University of Sheffield), “Carnotroping and Creaturely Resistance in Okja (2017)”
Abstract: In this paper I will introduce a new concept for understanding the human-animal relationship: carnotroping. Drawing on the concept of pornotroping, coined by Hortense Spillers and developed by Alexander Weheliye, which denotes the biopolitical transformation of black bodies into flesh under the regime of white supremacy, carnotroping names the material-discursive processes that render nonhuman animals edible and transform their bodies into meat. Reading carnotropes allows us to attend to the ways that ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ agencies are constructed and represented, as well as the species-political power dynamics that govern their interactions. Because the horror genre is especially concerned with monsters, violence, and edibility, interpreting its use of carnotropes can help draw out an underlying species politics.
Ecohorror often trades in carnotropes subversively by reversing the hierarchical human/animal dichotomy (and the corresponding eater/eaten dichotomy), particularly in animal vengeance narratives, imagining the human as meat and the animal as more-than-meat. However, Val Plumwood has demonstrated that strategies of reversal can actually reaffirm dualistic thinking.1 Addressing this problem with ecohorror, I will analyse Bong Joon Ho’s Okja (2017), a film that deploys carnotropes comically and horrifically to deconstruct the notion that animals are food. My paper will explore how Okja plays with the tropes of ecohorror, producing a cinematic nonhuman resistance that complicates, rather than simply reverses, the human/animal binary. Okja isn’t a horror film, but it is a monster movie; the titular monster being a large pig-like creature bred for meat. Okja herself is produced by the carnotropic animal agriculture industry, but the narrative is driven by creaturely resistance and her claim to subjectivity. I will explore how, through the ethical and empathic possibilities of the cinematic medium, Okja resists the violence done through the human/animal binary and offers instead a compelling vision of multispecies care and solidarity.
Bio: Ben Lomas is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His work examines representations of anthropophagy in Gothic literature, horror cinema, and popular culture, with a particular focus on their subversive relationship to the discourse of anthropocentrism. His project aims to problematise the notion of edibility that governs much of our relationship with nonhuman animals, drawing from the Gothic a posthuman ethics that recognises our messy, fleshy entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Anna Dijkstra (Independent Scholar), “Eating Brains as Food for Thought: An Argument for Ethico-Linguistic Transformation towards Cows in the Aftermath of the BSE Outbreak”
Abstract: The “Mad Cow Disease” crisis that surged through the United Kingdom in the 1990s is primarily thought of as a political scandal of human suffering. And while there were 178 human victims of vCJD, an oversight in our collective memory of the epidemic is striking: over 183,000 non-human animals, primarily cows, had their lives cut short by the disease in the United Kingdom alone – a count that does not include the millions murdered in anticipation of their illnesses. The cause of this epidemic was putting leftover meat, including parts of the central nervous system, into both cow and human food. In response, an almost metaphysical appeal was made to a universal immorality of cannibalism – after all, the cows’ infected food consisted of members of their own species. But apart from a non-committal sentiment about BSE being “nature’s revenge” for feeding flesh to herbivores, the fate of the majority of victims – the cows – has been ignored. Might we repurpose the metaphysical appeal to ethics entrenched in BSE discourse for good?
By considering the food-related transformation of these cows underlying this outbreak as a technological interference, my aim with this essay is, analysing various BSE broadcasts, to diagnose a transference of the suffering of cows that is simultaneously bodily and significatory, reconceptualising the cannibalistic sin as a semiotic curse. By invoking the Heideggerean concept of poetic revealing, Cornips’s cow linguistics, and interspecies phenomenology, I seek to emphasise how the material language we apply to non-human animals can be mapped onto the atrocities we subject them to. The harmful rhetoric of BSE might help us find a way out, too.
Bio: Anna Dijkstra is a literary researcher whose work focuses on the epistemological entanglements of modernist literature, with particular interests in non-human consciousness, the early Wittgenstein, H.D., and formal logic. She recently completed an MPhil in English Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her work has previously appeared in publications including the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Echinox Journal, and The Modernist Review, and she works as a researcher on the ERC-advanced funded Moral Residue (MORE) project.
Wouter Capitain (University of Göttingen), “Revolutionary Song and Speciesism in George Orwell’s Animal Farm”
Abstract: In George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), the song ‘Beasts of England’ incites the rebellion of the animals, who run the farm collectively after overthrowing their human oppressors. Later in the novel, the song again functions as a form of resistance against the tyranny of the pigs, who dominate the other species through their superior ability to read and write. While literacy is unevenly distributed among the farm’s inhabitants, the revolutionary song offers a realm where all animals are equal, at least momentarily. But how can interspecies equality be enacted through song? What does the animal revolution sound like?
In this paper, I offer a close reading of the composition and political resonances of ‘Beasts of England’ in order to contemplate the song’s resistance to speciesism (the belief, analogous to racism, that some species are naturally superior to others). I argue that, although music in Animal Farm provides a counterforce to the oppressive uses of language, ‘Beasts of England’ simultaneously questions whether the dictum that “all animals are equal” would also encompass creatures beyond the domesticated livestock, such as insects. Thus, the song champions interspecies equality while also suggesting that this ideal remains exclusionary.
My interpretation builds on previous analyses by literary scholars like Susan McHugh, Naama Harel, Stewart Cole, and John Drew who move beyond conventional readings of the novel as an anthropomorphized allegory of the Russian Revolution and instead highlight Animal Farm’s critique of animal exploitation. Yet, by drawing attention specifically to the sonic dimension of Animal Farm, I argue that the book suggests that, in order to successfully fight injustice and achieve proper equality, we ought to move beyond language as the predominant form of political discourse. Instead, Orwell implies, we ought to envision the animal revolution musically.
Bio: Wouter Capitain is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen. He investigates the performative social function of music in shaping discourses about human-animal distinctions, focusing on twentieth-century popular artworks such as Disney films and George Orwell’s novels. In 2021, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Edward Said and the intersections of music and postcolonialism. He edited Said’s posthumous book Said on Opera (2024) and is currently writing a monograph on Said’s music-related work.