Becoming Animal

Kári Driscoll, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, has translated Teresa Präauer's German book Tier werden into English. His translation, titled Becoming Animal, relates to his research in literary animal studies and aligns with the view on translation as a creative and scholarly practice.

Cultural zoology

Präauer is an award-winning author and artist based in Austria. In this long essay, she explores figures of transformation, transmission and translation across various languages, cultures, genres, media, spaces and species. Hybrids, chimeras, monsters and liminal creatures of all sorts inhabit these pages, reflecting their presence in the cultural archive from Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the present day.

Becoming Animal is a kind of cultural zoology. It depicts an image of human culture as an ongoing negotiation with the non-human world, a constant probing of the limits of the nameable and knowable. Words and images, as Präauer shows, are (like) living beings, constantly evolving, metamorphosing and ... becoming animal.

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