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Aside from a wonderful 2012 edition of William Kirby’s Le Chien d’or, McGill-Queen’s University Press has not published many books about the beloved animal that resides in a third of all Canadian homes. Fortunately, our Fall 2019 catalogue returned dogs to the literary spotlight. Three vastly different books employed unique styles to investigate the significance of the canine.
In October, Ganymede’s Dog by John Emil Vincent was published as part of the Hugh MacLennan Poetry series. The collection embeds gay culture, Greek mythology, and philosophy in a glorious reflection on humanity. Of course, the prose poems are teeming with dog imagery, providing a powerful theme upon which this beautiful and winding text may rest.
November brought us the diverse volume Dog’s Best Friend?: Rethinking Canid-Human Relations, edited by John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka. Featured essays confront the inconsistencies in human attitudes toward canids, exploring the synergistic relationship between people, dogs, and their environmental contexts. After reading these globe-trotting tales, readers may question the limits of personhood entirely.
Gregory Forth’s A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society was published in December. Forth’s fascinating study of animal metaphors among the Nage people engages with the recent ontological turn in anthropology, linking cross-cultural linguistic principles to conceptions of human-animal relations around the world. This incredible reimagining of metaphorical thought is not to be missed.
If you are curious about our recent dog-related books, we have included them below.
By Gregory Forth
“A dog pissing at the edge of a path,” in the language of the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores, refers to someone who begins something but is regularly distracted by other matters. In this first comprehensive study of animal metaphors in a non-Western society, Gregory Forth focuses on how the Nage understand metaphor and use their knowledge of animals to shape specific expressions. Based on extensive field research, A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path explores the meaning and use of over 560 animal metaphors employed by the Nage. Investigating how closely their indigenous concept of pata péle corresponds to the Greek-derived English concept of metaphor, Forth considers whether metaphors reveal significant differences in conceptions of human-animal relations, the human-animal contrast, and human understanding of other humans in different parts of the world.
Gregory Forth is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta.
Edited by John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka
Examining the complexity and contradiction inherent in human attitudes toward dogs, Dog’s Best Friend? looks at how our relationships with canids have shaped and also been transformed by different political and economic contexts. Journeying from ancient Greek and Roman societies to Japan’s Edo period to eighteenth-century England, essays explore how dogs are welcomed as family, consumed in some Asian food markets, and used in Western laboratories. Several contributors provide glimpses of the interactions between street dogs and humans in Bali, India, Taiwan, and Turkey, while others illuminate the position of the dog in Western cultural imaginaries. The book delves into the fantasies and fears that play out in stereotypes of coyotes and wolves, while also acknowledging that events such as the Wolf Howl in Canada’s Algonquin Park indicate the emergence of new popular perspectives on canids. Questioning where canids belong, how they should be treated, and what rights they should have, Dog’s Best Friend? reconsiders the concept of justice and whether it can be extended beyond the limit of the human species.
John Sorenson is professor in the Department of Sociology at Brock University.
Atsuko Matsuoka is professor in the School of Social Work at York University.
By John Emil Vincent
Took all this time to actually in fact bite our own tail to learn that that hurts; I guess it was worth it. / Developed a taste for tails.
John Emil Vincent teases his materials into surreal, joyous, dirty, sometimes gruesome animation. His revelations arrive in the guise of other characters, and throughout, there are dogs. Dog-themed philosophy, dog-headed saints, dog-worshipping island rituals, and just plain dogs invite the reader to puppy-pile with Petronius, Catherine the Great, and Saint Christopher in a sapiosexual orgy with autocorrect handling the towels. Deeply infused with gay culture and mythology, Ganymede’s Dog is a collection of smart, knowing, allusive, often ironic poems that ponder the boundaries of legend and the privileges of youth and beauty.
John Emil Vincent is a poet and the author of Excitement Tax. He lives in Montreal.
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