RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article T1 Audial and visual conversation in Mary Oliver’s "Dog Songs": language as a trans-species faculty A1 Loreto, Paola K1 Literary animal studies K1 Animal language K1 Narrative empathy K1 Literary soundscapes K1 Mary Oliver K1 Dog Songs K1 Estudios de los animales K1 Lenguaje animal K1 Empatía narrativa K1 Literatura K1 Literature K1 Medio ambiente K1 Environmental science AB The essay investigates Mary Oliver’s reflection upon, and questioning of, language as a marker of human/nonhuman divide as it unfolds in her second, 2013 “species collection” on dogs, “Dog Songs” (her first one being “Owls and Other Fantasies”, her 2006 similar collection, portraying her ways of communicating with birds). Through an exploration of both the visual and audial modes of Oliver’s conversations with the dogs she lived with in her life, and treated as companions, this study demonstrates that the poet held an attitude toward the nonhuman which in contemporary theoretical terms would be defined as an “indistinction approach” to the animal question (Calarco 2015). In “Dog Songs”, Oliver portrays a proximity between humans and animals that ultimately preserves an unavoidable distance. Her writing exploits both her intuition of animals’ capacity for agency and creativity—which accompanies the de-emphasizing of human uniqueness—and her consciousness that we need tropes from human experience to convey our perception of nonhuman ways of life. Moreover, through her representation of the animal’s gaze, of a powerfully ironic reversal of the aims (and effects) of the pathetic fallacy, and of narrative empathy, she proves that a “zoopoetics”, i.e., an imaginative use of language in poetry, can make it a distinct space for our efforts to envisage an ecosystem that animals may inhabit as our equals. PB Universidad de Alcalá SN 2171-9594 YR 2021 FD 2021 LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/47890 UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/47890 LA eng DS MINDS@UW RD 28-mar-2024