Animal Mimesis. Intersections of Aesthetics and Anthropology

Taking a meta-perspective on academic trends and publishing, this paper shows that hoaxes of scholarly and scientific research often rely on a somewhat problematic distinction between good and bad mimesis.

This paper examines the blurring of boundaries between animal and human mimesis in Daniel Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" and argues that it is the seemingly mechanic voice of the parrot that enables Robinson to become the subject of the modern novel.

This paper focuses on the anti-Semitic bestialization of ‘the Jew’ in the nineteenth and at beginning of the twentieth century and presents a reading of Kafka’s "A Report to an Academy" as a subversion of stereotypes that identify Jews with animals, in particular with apes.

This paper investigates the problematic relationship between humans and animals in the early twentieth-century crisis of language (Sprachkrise) as well as the merging between both in the act of sacrifice.

This paper considers the symbolical meanings of the peacock in the fourteenth-century manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Douce 308, in terms of what they might imply about medieval attitudes towards the senses of sight and hearing.

This paper focuses on the ways in which the cancer has inspired composers to prompt performers to sing/play a written line backwards, addressing also the symbolical and philosophical implications of this notational technique.

This papers analyses the diverse theories of animal mimicry that spread around 1900 and argues that these theories should be considered not so much as a step in the development of Darwinism, but as part of the history of media and as being engaged in the search for the ‘perfect medium’ in this period.

This paper addresses the tendency to recognize human and animal faces in art as well as in design, featuring examples such as Daumier's caricatures, Lebrun’s physiognomy, Emoticons and car design.

This paper introduces the conference subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. Manuel Mühlbacher gives an overview of the question ranging from Aristoteles’ thesis that human mimesis involves understanding to echoes of the same line of argument in eighteenth-century philosophy. Katerina Krčal traces the shift of the perspective in the human-animal divide since Darwin’s theory of evolution. Antonio Chemotti shifts the focus to the question of animal mimesis in music from the Middle Ages and discusses the role animals play in origin myths of music.