Language/Literature paper by Vöő, Gabriella
Multispecies Events in the Zoopoetics of Géza Szőcs (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Animals are ubiquitous in the poetry of Géza Szőcs. After “carrying” meaning as tenors in the tropes of his early poetry, they reappear in his later poetic output in a wholly novel form, as independent actors resisting the process of metaphorization. The presentation discusses a selection of poems as zoopoetic texts that are, in the definition of Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann, “predicated upon an engagement with animals and animality.” These poems reflect on their own language and textuality by performing the re-embodiment of language through a peculiar partnership between the poetic self and the animal. It will argue that the zoopoetic texts of Szőcs capture the experience of radical otherness in “multispecies events” (Aaron Moe’s term). Such events open new horizons of meaning which would not exist without the shift between human and animal perspectives. The subversion and deconstruction of the human-centered worldview occurs, in the poetry of Szőcs, through encounters with animals, thinking through animals, and becoming animal. These moments of human-animal encounter are also an integral part of the identity politics of Szőcs as a Transylvanian poet.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Gabriella Vöő is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Pécs, Hungary. She specializes in nineteenth-and twentieth-century American literature and culture and the reception of British and American
authors in Hungary. Her publications include essays on US antebellum fiction and poetry,
gender in nineteenth-century cultural politics, a volume of essays on the reception of British and Irish writers in Hungary (2011), and a book on Edgar Allan Poe (2016).