Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes
Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes
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Abstract
The volume offers an extended meditation on different senses of bird mimicry in literature: the way birds mimic humans, the way humans mimic birds, and the way mimicry of any kind involves technologies of mimicry that extend across as well as beyond languages and species. The essays examine the historical, poetic, and semiotic problem of mimesis exemplified both by the imitative behavior of parrots, starlings, and other mocking birds, and by the poetic trope of such birds in a range of literary and philological traditions. Drawing from a cross-section of traditional periods and fields in literary studies (eighteenth-century studies, romantic studies, early American studies, twentieth-century studies, and postcolonial studies), the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture. The volume presents thirteen ways of looking at mocking bird technologies: nine critical essays, a dialogic meditation, an afterword, and a coda. The look of the academic essay is complemented by the look of accompanying specimens of bird mimicry.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
Parrots and Starlings
Christopher GoGwilt andMelanie D. Holm
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1
“O Friends, There Are No Friends”: The Aesthetics of Avian Sympathy in Defoe and Sterne
Melanie D. Holm
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2
The Avian Challenge of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana; or, The Pigeon Effect
Shari Goldberg
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3
Smart’s Professors: Birdsong and Rhetorical Agency in Jubilate Agno
Fraser Easton
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4
A Volatile Unity: Coleridge, Starling Murmurations, and Romantic Form
Gavin Sourgen
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5
Words Are for the Birds: “Non-reasoning Creatures Capable of Speech” in the Writings of Schreber and Poe
Joe Conway
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6
Splitting the Lyric Lark; or, Dickinson’s Music Box
Isabel A. Moore
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7
The Starling’s Whistle: Autophilology and the Order of Osip Mandel’shtam’s Birds
Holt Vincent Meyer
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8
Colonial and Postcolonial Birds of Game, Games of Bird
Fawzia Mustafa
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9
Of Mimicry, Birds, and Words: The Technology of Starling Song in European, American, and Indonesian Poetry
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10
Yogini and Mynah Bird: On the Poetics and Politics of Transspecies Meditation
Madeleine Brainerd andKaori Kitao
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Afterword
A “Starling” Manifesto for Mocking Bird Technologies
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Coda
Tornada, in Starling Form
Sarah Kay
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End Matter
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