Eco-Emotions seminar with Karin Kukkonen

Mimetic Animals

For this seminar, I will share work in progress from the JEUX project, which investigates how the writers in early-modern salons played with literary forms. Non-human animals make different appearances in the salon conversations, games, as well as in the literary fictions that emerge from these occasions. For the seminar, I’m particularly interested in exploring how the salonnières conceived of the chameleon, the monkey and the parrot as «mimetic animals», that is, as animals that imitate. Imitation is considered typical of creative work in the period, and I would like to discuss how both representations and creative practices in the salons deploy these «mimetic animals» in order to rethink human poetics through non-human animals.

Please contact Karin Kukkonen or Stefka G. Eriksen for a draft of the article.