An Applied Vegan Poetics

Abstract

This dissertation engages poetic contemplations of nonhuman and human animals in order to propose what I call a vegan poetics: that is, an applied reading/writing practice in service of an inclusive liberatory struggle and by way of imaginative translation, transformation and embodiment of animals. The first chapter charts a definitional inquiry into the framework, situating it within the historical, social and scholarly contexts from which it emerges, and offering key theoretical and methodological entry points. The subsequent chapters, or “Acts,” then illustrate the concept in action, modelling an applied vegan poetic reading practice using the work of contemporary female poets. Together, my readings of these texts (and the tensions they illuminate) articulate both the potential and limitations of poetry as an instrument for linguistic and social change. The ambition of my project is to develop a poetic reading/writing practice that negotiates the entangled relations between human and nonhuman bodies and dismantles anthropocentric paradigms of violence deeply entrenched in our culture and scholarship. In order to achieve this, I argue new forms of language are needed. In this sense, the poet plays an important role in the project of animal liberation. Through a vegan poetics, the reader is driven to fundamentally reconceptualize human categorization of and coexistence with animal beings, allowing for the poetic transfiguration of commodified objects into living subjects. By cultivating emancipatory literary practices An Applied Vegan Poetics initiates both imaginative and material emancipatory action.