Becoming Animals

An unveiling of the presence of captivating figures and creatures throughout history.

In this gripping philosophical and cultural exploration, Teresa Präauer sets out to investigate figures of transformation, transmission, and translation--across languages, cultures, genres, media, species, and spaces. Hybrids, chimeras, monsters, and liminal creatures of all sorts inhabit these pages, as indeed they do the pages of the cultural archive from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day: everything from the harpies, ape-men, and cynocephali that inhabit the edges of medieval maps and taxonomies to the Krampuses and Furries that roam through Alpine villages and convention centers today. Yet these chimeras are not aberrations; rather, they reveal an essential truth about culture and artistic expression.

What emerges in Becoming Animal is a kaleidoscopic image of culture as the constant probing of the limits of the sayable, as an unending process of attempting to capture in words and symbols that which cannot be pinned down.

Teresa Präauer is an author and visual artist based in Vienna. Becoming Animal is her first work to be published in English. Kári Driscoll is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University and an award-winning translator. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Humanimalia and has published widely on the poetics of animality.