@article{Fraipont_2016, title={‘Vort paard, hu!’: Charlotte Mutsaers’ Animal Writing through Kafka’s Animal Stories}, volume={7}, url={https://www.journalofdutchliterature.org/index.php/jdl/article/view/143}, abstractNote={<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal writing. While Mutsaers often refers in her work to Kafka’s animal texts, she also distances herself from Kafka’s representation of a ‘becoming-animal’ in his short story </span><span>Die Verwandlung </span><span>(1912). In order to better understand Mutsaers’ relation to Kafka and to gain insight into the underlying animal poetics and politics of the Dutch author, this article focuses on Mutsaers’ novel </span><span>Rachels Rokje </span><span>(1994). Using the framework of the </span><span>Cultural and Literary Animal Studies </span><span>(CLAS) and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on animality, it shows how Mutsaers both deterritorialises and reterritorialises Kafka’s animals in her novel. By referring to a </span><span>zoe</span><span>-approach as defined by Braidotti (2011), this article argues that Mutsaers’ zoopoetics not only occurs in a playful manner, but also in a biopolitical perspective in which a form of affinity and egalitarianism between species is put forward. </span></p></div></div></div>}, number={2}, journal={Journal of Dutch Literature}, author={Fraipont, Barbara}, year={2016}, month={Nov.} }