Animal Ethics and Zoopoetics in the Poetry of Alice Fulton

Paula Currás-Prada

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Chapter 11 Animal Ethics and Zoopoetics in the Poetry of Alice Fulton

In: Women Who Write Animals

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Paula Currás-Prada

Paula Currás-Prada
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 210–229

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004754584-013

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Abstract

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously noted that “if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it” (235). As can be easily deduced, this impenetrability lies not in the lion’s language but in the lion’s perception of the world, which is necessarily different, inaccessible from a human perspective. However, the existence of such an epistemological impasse does not mean the absence of relationality or response-ability (retrieving Haraway’s terminology) between human and non-human animals. In Humanimales (2022), Segarra explores the areas of contact between human beings and non-human animals, arguing for the emergence of a “humanimal being” that succeeds in opening the borders of the human and questions the classic, Cartesian, masculine subject. Feminist poets such as Alice Fulton have examined the animal question in terms of the existent affinity between “animal thinking” and “poetic thinking” (Driscoll and Hoffmann 3), creating texts that are not necessarily “about” animals, but rather “predicated upon an engagement with animals and animality (human and non-human)” (4). This chapter will argue for the complexity of Fulton’s poetic engagement with non-human animals, approximating her poetic stance to Segarra’s arguments, but also to what Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann have termed “zoopoetics,” a renovated approach to poetry and animals that recognises their agency and voice without engaging in anthropocentrism.

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Women Who Write Animals

Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World

Series: Nature, Culture and Literature, Volume: 21

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004754584

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 Apr 2026

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- Literature and Cultural Studies
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Chapter 11 Animal Ethics and Zoopoetics in the Poetry of Alice Fulton

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Women Who Write Animals

Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World

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