2022: Special Issue 11: The time of the linguistically gifted animals. Order, variance and historicity (in) animal epics
The fabulous animals' gift for language was understood as an indication of a fictional narrative that allows human relationships to be recognised in a timeless way in the mirror of unchanging animal nature. However, the speech, thoughts and actions of the characters in the pre-modern animal epic are by no means to be neatly separated from the merely inauthentic symbolic function of their mute, unreasonable animality in the sense of a poetic a priori, but are designed to unsettle man's trust in his own rationality and power to act. This uncertainty becomes productive in the range of forms of the genre as well as in individual texts: the expectation of the normative immutability of nature develops into the counterpoint of drafts of order with open temporality; scenarios of indeterminable intentionality, historical changeability and crisis-ridden alternativity emerge.
