sam's vegan diner

Can’t stop the reading list, 12.

12. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal

From the first chapter:

The Postmodern Animal’s hypothesis is that there was no modern animal, no ‘modernist’ animal.  Between nineteenth-century animal symbolism, with its reasonably secure hold on meaning, and the postmodern animal images whose ambiguity or irony or sheer brute presence serves to resist or to displace fixed meanings, lies modernism at its most arid.  This hypothesis, it must be said, is essentially art-historical in its emphases: it is specifically to do with the look of the animal body, and with what that look was understood to say about the artist responsible for the representation.