Melancholia's Dog

Reflections on Our Animal Kinship

Alice A. Kuzniar

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
01 November 2006

The Arts: General & Reference; Literary studies: general; Philosophy; Animals & society

Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing. An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholia’sDog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.

By: Alice A. Kuzniar
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: Annotated edition
Dimensions: Height: 24mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 2mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226465784
ISBN 10: 0226465780
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 01 November 2006
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Alice A. Kuzniar is professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Reviews for Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship

This is probably the first time that a scholar of Kuzniar's ability has shown the courage to tackle the deeper aspects of our relationship with dogs....Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps we didn't want to face it. Thanks to Alice Kuzniar, we know it now. --Elizabeth Marshall Thomas London Review of Books (02/22/2007)