CULIVIAN

The group is structured around the research and study of the non-human animal in European and North American literature, as well as in different visual media (cinema, theatre, television, photography, painting, sculpture, etc.), with the aim of advancing in the field of (Critical) Animal Studies which, especially in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, have re-oriented both the philosophical conceptualisation of the animal and the interpretative mechanisms suggested by its aesthetic representation as otherness. Taking as a starting point the most recent philosophical and scientific theories related to animal subjectivity (from studies of consciousness and sentience to the ethical consequences that derive in legislation and/or regulations on animal welfare, or the also derived principles of animal rights and animal liberation), the aim is to study and compare how the works of certain authors, artists and other types of creators can offer an aesthetic treatment that questions anthropocentric parameters, while responding to current concerns about animal nature. This largely revisionist treatment allows us to further explore the semiotics that intertwine the literary and visual cultures of different nations with the ethical conceptualisation of the animal as a subject-of-a-life that, beyond the more traditional and historically rooted allegorical systems to which it has been subjected, questions the conceptual and artistic boundaries between species, within the framework of the "animal turn" in the age of the anthropocene.