Steel, Karl (Author)
Columbia University
Crane, Susan
Edition Details: Advisor: Crane, Susan
Physical Details: 296 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation identifies a primary method by which humans sought to identify themselves as human in the Middle Ages. In a double process, humans claimed a set of capabilities for themselves--reason, language, authentically upright bodies, and immortal souls--and denied them to animals, which regardless of the differences among animal individuals and animal species, were all construed as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffled human claims to uniqueness. In the face of such threats, humans established their difference and thus themselves by subjugating animals, by domesticating, killing, and eating them, or indeed simply by valuing human above animal life. Because the human was an effect of the action of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself, the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain. The central insight of this dissertation derives from and develops Jacques Derrida's late coinage "carno-phallogocentrism," the fundamentally violent relationship to animals that grants humans their claim to unique possession of reason and self-awareness. Works studied in this dissertation derive from many genres: they include the encyclopedias Sidrak and Bokkus and Thomas of Cantimpré's Liber de Natura Rerum; the carrion laws of the Penitentials and the butchery laws of late medieval London; the chivalric narratives Yvain and the Avowyng of Arthur ; teratologic studies of dog-headed humans such as Ratramnus of Corbie's Epistola de Cynocephalis ; Prudentius' hymn "Ante Cibum"; the parodic Testamentum Porcelli ; and the hagiographic story of Saint Nicholas and the Three Clerks.
...MoreDescription “Identifies a primary method by which humans sought to identify themselves as human in the Middle Ages.” (from the abstract) Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/10 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3285172.
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