Twórczość literacka i artystyczna Güntera Grassa jest dobrym przykładem wielogatunkowego dzieła, w którym niedocenione zwierzęta, zwłaszcza mogące budzić w człowieku obrzydzenie, są oczyszczane z kulturowo i politycznie zatrutej przeszłości albo uwalniane z ekologicznie antropocentrycznej niewidzialności i podniesione do poziomu poetyckiego oraz politycznego znaczenia. Artykuł analizuje sposoby, w jakie Grass wykorzystuje metafory gatunków – węgorzy, kumaków i szczurów – w tworzeniu kultury pamięci i wypowiedziach na temat nazistowskiej przeszłości i Holokaustu.

On the populist front the language and imagery used for migrants reinforce the perception of them as trespassers and criminals, implying fears of their appearance in large numbers or as lone wolf terrorists. The German right-wing party AfD compares the recent appearance of wolves on German soil with what it perceives as trespassing migrants; Trump used to refer to migrants from the global South as "animals", labelling them as "predators and invaders infesting America"; David Cameron famously invoked the images of biblical locust infestations by comparing migrants with "swarms of people coming across the Mediterranean"; and UK media pundit Katie Hopkins compared migrants with "feral humans" and "cockroaches". It is a rhetoric that has become an integral part of what Fintan O'Toole has described as the "new pre-rather than old post-fascist" political climate. In my essay I will discuss three contemporary novels, Francisco Cant & uacute;'s The Line Becomes a River (2018), Norbert Scheuer's Winterbienen (Winter Bees, 2019), and Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008) to demonstrate how these authors instrumentalize three species metaphors - wolves, bees, and cockroaches - for a literary representation of forced migration. Their works show us how fluid such metaphors are and how these authors reconfigure three species metaphors and redeem them from former cultural and political representations.

University teaching in a context of escalating planetary crisis requires new approaches to pedagogical encounter. Reconceptualising the university classroom as a potential refuge from polycrisis, we identify symptoms and effects of the academic-industrial complex and 'fast academia' in our practice, and we develop ways to take refuge from these effects so as to resist or undo them. These paths of resistance include: conscious deceleration and willed slowness as method and ethos; greater openness to the specificities of place and to the interaction of place and learning; a loosening of goal orientation; and closer attention to non-human life-forms and to possibilities for interspecies co-existence in a mode of 'wild diplomacy'. We draw on Baptiste Morizot's reflections on enforestment and tracking, which foreground reciprocal relationships between places and the creatures, including humans, who move and cohabit within them, and we activate these reflections to reconfigure pedagogical dynamics both within and outside the classroom. We elaborate an ethos of enforestment with reference to three examples from our practice: the wolf seminar, the woodland class and a walk in the woods. In each instance, the realities of ecological relation are determinedly confronted and acknowledged, not as theme, topic, or object of study, but as the very ground of academic practice.

This chapter focuses on contemporary authors and one visual artist who engage with narratives of the wolf in the context of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and human migration. By employing an ecocritical approach I will show how fluid the biopolitically charged wolf metaphor is and how contemporary artists have tried to liberate this historically blighted image from its traditional demonisation and use for dehumanisation in order to underscore the crisis in biocultural diversity. How does contemporary literature in particular employ the metaphor of the wolf and the werewolf in the context of forced migration, the notion of abandonment, the liminal status of refugees, and their search for sanctuaries? How does this literature, in talking about biodiversity, also address cultural diversity? The need for wolf sanctuaries and hospitality for migrants and refugees connotates a shared space in which multiculturalism and ecological diversity can thrive. The chapter examines how this urgent issue is imaginatively addressed by contemporary visual artist Rainer Opolka and in literary texts by Hassan Blasim, Sarah Hall, László Krasnahorkai, and Roland Schimmelpfennig.

One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have faced is how to voice the traumatic memories that haunt them. Although in his seminal Language and Silence George Steiner once claimed that “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason”, the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was an obvious exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life by writing about it and analysing what happened to him. He has left us an oeuvre in which he unceasingly found ways to express his memories of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, from February 1944 until his liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945. This article demonstrates how Levi was able to express himself about the trauma he had experienced specifically by employing language and imagery derived from myths such as Tantalus and Homer’s Odyssey, but primarily also through the use of metaphor. Close attention is paid to the role of chemistry in Levi’s life, his philosophy of chemistry, how it influenced his literary career, and how in the face of persistent silence about the Holocaust the use of chemical metaphors in The Periodic Table (1975) provided Levi with a means to translate to himself and the world his harrowing memories of his year in Auschwitz.

Through a selection of literary texts featuring cockroaches in the wake of Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (1915): Clarice Lispector's A paixao segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H., 1988), Marc Estrin's Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Scholastique Mukasonga's Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006; Cockroaches, 2016), and Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008), this article shows how these authors politicize the cockroach as bestia sacra between trauma and resilience. These literary works are exemplary in demonstrating how Anthropocene fiction resists and destabilizes biopolitically charged species metaphors with their dehumanizing agency. How do these authors, in writing beyond Kafka's doomed human cockroach, liberate the species blattodae from its aura of dehumanization and draw on the resilience of this ancient species in the face of adversity and as a model for human agency?

Ursula Seeber, Veronika Zwerger, Doerte Bischoff, and Carla Swiderski, eds. Mensch und Tier in Reflexionen des Exils. Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch vol. 39. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. viii + 408 pp.; 51 b&w, 20 colour illus. €39,95 (paper & ebook)

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.

In view of the current rhetoric surrounding the global migrant crisis – with politicians comparing refugees with animals and media reports warning of migrants swarming like insects or trespassing like wolves – this timely study explores the cultural origins of the language and imagery of dehumanization.

Digital storytelling techniques and persuasive communications are becoming increasingly intertwined and realized in cultural discourses such as cultural heritage, environmental activism, and politics. Rhetorical theory has grounded and influenced communication practice since the age of oration, and as society is increasingly undergoing new mediatization, digital rhetorical theory can be reexamined and applied to nonfiction digital narratives for improved practice. Narratology provides key theoretical foundations that are braided into digital rhetoric for application to digital nonfiction narratives. This article highlights how new media has changed the impacts of the modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos) on today's multimedia-consuming audiences and how the classical rhetorical canons (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory) can be reframed and updated by incorporating narrative theory to aid creators of new nonfiction digital narratives across different genres.

Although iDocs are a newer genre of non-fiction IDNs, there are few studies reporting results on their impact and the user experience. A common goal of iDocs is to engage the pubic in social, economic and environmental issues. This investigation applied the iDoc genre to cultural heritage to create a prototype for user testing titled Sentenced to Transportation: A Virtual Tour of Australia’s Convict Past. The user testing completed in this study analysed three key variables: the level of perceived agency based on the narrative structure, choices provided in the interface design, and ability to persuade further user participation. The results show that users can be persuaded through the narrative design to proceed non-linearly and to engage in further user participation post-interaction.

ABSTRACT This article discusses how the politics of dewilding and rewilding interact with biodiversity, cultural diversity, and cultural production. Although dewilding – stripping nature of healthy ecosystems and its various species – is still a widespread practice around the globe, it has a particular relationship with the colonial period. Dewilding under colonialism implies the suppression of the resistance of the colonized as well as the extermination of species, especially of those standing in as metaphors for the resistance of those to be colonized. As a case study, this article analyses the metaphorical perception of the wolf from the colonial period in Britain, Ireland, and the US until today to demonstrate how literature has supported both the extermination and the reinstitution of wolves, and how the trajectory from “dewolfing” to “rewolfing” can potentially benefit both nature and culture.

Introduction to special focus on Literary Walks, Slow Travel, and Eco-Awareness in Contemporary Literature

ABSTRACT Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are increasingly using digital technologies for storytelling and creating mobile applications (apps) for cultural heritage content, but how apps are used in practice to communicate information to users has not been widely studied. A team of people from a heritage organisation, a university, and mobile app development group plan to create a bespoke heritage trail app for Ireland, but to date design conventions/recommendations for this genre are lacking. This article applies a systematic approach to digital narrative content analysis to better understand how apps are being used specifically for heritage trails with the aim of identifying what the common features are, which modalities and narrative techniques are used. The selected corpus included 55 apps downloaded from the Google Play Store. The results of this content analysis—based on the App Walkthrough Method (Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900)—show that there is a gap between academic research themes/trends and how digital narrative is actually being communicated in the current market, and it aims to inform the future development of heritage trail apps by including a list of design and content features common to this genre.

When Grass was working on Die Blechtrommel in Paris, Paul Celan recommended he read Gottlob Regis’ translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival this article analyses Grass’s indebtedness to the French author for the purpose of attacking the political climate of his time. The focus is on body images, Grass’s criticism of the state and the church, instances of misogyny, the human/animal divide, questions of genre and parody, as well as Grass’s critical stance vis à vis post-war political avowals of reason as a stratagem of self-distancing from the irrationalism of the Third Reich. The article demonstrates that hybridity relates to more than the Bakhtinian grotesque body of the protagonist, but is closely linked to mimicry, mockery, and ultimately subversion as key feature of human / animal liminality in the postmodern satirical novel with its roots in the European picaresque.