This essay explores the similarities and interconnections between John Dewey’s explicitly naturalist concept of art, laid out in his 1934 text Art as Experience, and the work of the modern...

Marianne Moore, John Dewey, and the Aesthetics of Animal Life

Medical humanities is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary field of study that has experienced explosive growth in the United States since the 1960s. Two key components of medical humanities include first, the use of literature, poetry, and visual arts in the education of medical students, and second, the representation or examination of medical culture by scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences such as literary and film creators, sociologists, and anthropologists. The American Association of Medical Colleges recently reported that as of 2018, approximately 94% of medical schools had core or elective humanities offerings in their curricula. The examination of the medical milieu by scholars across the humanities has resulted in the emergence of important specialty fields such as end-of-life care, disability studies, and health disparities research. Veterinary medicine has been slow to embrace the humanities as relevant to our profession and to the education of our students. Only sporadic, isolated attempts to document the value of the arts and humanities can be found in the veterinary literature, and valuable observations on our profession made by scholars in diverse disciplines of the humanities are largely buried in publications not often accessed by veterinarians. Here a case is made that the time is right for the emergence of a more cohesive field of veterinary humanities. Embracing the observations of humanities scholars who engage with our profession, and appreciating the ways in which the humanities themselves are effective tools in the education of veterinary professionals, will bring many benefits to our evolving profession.

Life, Death, and Humanity in Veterinary Medicine: Is it Time to Embrace the Humanities in Veterinary Education?

Abstract This article centres on the literary representation of the pregnant body in the short story Skördebrev by Helena Granström. The short story interlocks the narration of the pregnant experience with narration from the perspective of a dairy cow on a farm, thus negotiating the dominating discourses surrounding farmed animals and human pregnancy. The article investigates these matters by discussing the relations between the characters, the farmed animals and the farmed landscape as portrayed in the short story, and in doing this, examines what the relations convey about the portrayal of human, non-human and pregnant corporeality and identity in the text. It does this using Stacy Alaimo’s term trans-corporeality, Karen Barad’s notions of intra-action and Ann-Sofie Lönngren’s adaption of this theory to literary analysis. The article suggests that the text offers an understanding of the material situatedness of the literary pregnant subject and the dairy cow as partly shared and argues that it shows the potential of literary representation to articulate these intersecting positions. In doing this, it suggests that the text negotiates the societal power structures that are at play in the Western cultural understanding of pregnancy as well as in the farming environment, in an ethical and political manner.

Of Pregnancy and Dairy Cows: Entanglements of Materiality, Pregnancy and the Farmed Animal in Helena Granström’s ”Skördebrev”

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.110.1.0028

Vanessa Robinson

Papers

Poetry's language of animals: towards a new understanding of the animal other