The article’s starting point is to recognize what is the relation between the cultural animal studies and empirical research, particularly: what is the role of the cognitive ethology in the humanities, what kind of merger we are observing, and if and how transdisciplinarity is possible here. One of the solutions, presented in the article, is to analyse animal texts of culture within a zoocritic perspective. This perspective aims at developing animal studies in the humanities, especially with regard to fiction, and narrows too wide and variated studies about animals down into a critical tool. Zoocriticism is introduced in the article on the example of Polish interwar poem about the tiger written by Tytus Czyżewski – it is a narrated by the author of the article experiment to experience the world from the perspective of the predator; it is a trial to perceive the reality in the posthuman way enabled by this zoopoetic text.
In the article life and work of Maria Skłodowska-Curie is presented through the sources of her physical vulnerability and her strength. Her biography is a history of her body that belonged to the scholar, woman, mother and lover: strong but suffering, experiencing pleasure and humiliation. Her life is thus seen from the perspective of its wounds, mutilation, chronic disease that cannot be separate from its intellectual part. The desire to reach the mystery of nature, discover its treasures, was synonymous with the need to sacrifice the body, abandon it in order to get where the laws of physics disappear, beyond materiality. Self-destruction, in this case a kind of spiritual transgression, was not equal with the denial of sexuality, on the contrary - it was the main source of scientific inspiration.
Despite the fact that Ossendowski’s writings do not belong to the most prominent critical voices of the nineteenth century model of a circus they are original for the Polish history of non-anthropocentric literature. This approach to the circus becomes a kind of dominant in one of Ossendowski’s texts and allows to extract "Zwierzyniec", written in 1931, from unflattering reviews by directing the text into a more significant and zoocentric forms of narration endowed in the text.
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