Posts filed under 'animal rights'

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Domestication: Where Love and Ownership Meet

When companion species are left alone to live an equal life with species commonly considered “wild”, is it truly a fair and desirable situation?

In the final essay of this series taking an in-depth look at select pieces of our Spring 2023 Animal Feature, Charlie Ng discusses Marcelo Cohen’s unsettling satire, “Ruby and the Dancing Lake”, and its depiction of a world in which animals are truly free from human possession—or so it seems. By acknowledging our reality, in which “natural” alignments between wildness and domesticity no longer fit easily on a moral axis, Cohen’s story probes at the role of love in our relationships with animals, as well as the uncertain ideal of their freedom.

Can we love animals without knowing their real needs?

In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer compares the “tyranny of human over nonhuman animals” to that of racial dominance, stating that the plights of animals caused by human superiority is a moral issue no less significant than the injustice of racial discrimination. Animal vulnerability is one of the primary subjects that underlie bioethics, compelling us to respect nonhuman animals as individual beings who have an embodied existence, susceptible to suffering equal to that of human beings. While this suffering cannot be ended overnight, can literature take on the active role of imagining a world where animals live free from captivity and exploitation?

With its exploration of imagined possibilities and alternative realities, speculative fiction can be a meaningful genre that challenges readers to think more thoroughly about animal welfare and to re-examine ways of bettering human-animal relationships. “Ruby and the Dancing Lake” by Argentine novelist Marcelo Cohen, presented in Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, is one such example. With its strangeness and playfulness, the short story can be read as a thought experiment of animal liberation, taking place in a parallel universe where any ownership of animals is banned. However, in this realm, both animal cruelty and labour have only become more clandestine, while compassionate humans are left bereft, longing for the happiness brought by animals and their companionship. With its satirical representation, the story is not only critical of animal exploitation, but also recognises the inhumanity of attempting to sever all human-animal bonds, which may not entirely foster any deep awareness for cherishing animal lives. READ MORE…

Hebrew Poetry from Ron Dahan’s Collection “Youth”

Dahan's portrayals of war and daily life in Israel are stirring: precise yet deftly ambiguous, casual yet anguished

A soda machine burns outside a grocery store

and all the Pepsi and the Coke (diet, too) and the Sprite

Explode in all directions like grenades.

The village of Markabe is burnt and bombed like in a war movie.

And like in a war movie

there’s the guy who carries a heavy jerrycan on his back

and the guy with the cigarette between his teeth

and the guy called Nir

and the guy who’s going to die and doesn’t know it so he allows himself to reminisce about that time when

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