ABSTRACT
The eld of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism “zooësis” for this new perspective, I want to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose term “zoontologies” recognizes the central role played by the gure of the animal and the category of animality in all those “seminal reroutings of contemporary theory away from the constitutive gure of the human” (2003b: xi). Zooësis, as I conceive it, includes
the myriad performative and semiotic elements involved in the vast range of cultural animal practices. Comprising both our actual and imaginative interactions with nonhuman animals, zooësis is the discourse of animality in human life, and its effects permeate our social, psychological, and material existence.
