The Horse in Literature and Film (2025)

Horses at the Frontier in Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2010

Children's Books Adaptations: A Reading of War Horse

2014

Adaptations are significant in the sense that they offer a rebirth and reinterpretation to the once forgotten literary works through an audio-visual narrative. Clad in the new form of technology, they transcend the boundaries of literacy enabling the text to have a deeper penetration into the ideological framework of the present society. The phenomenon of adapting literature into film has flourished in the late nineteenth century, and children’s literature has left its own landmarks in the arena from Alice in Wonderland (1903) to recent Hunger Games (2012) movies. Film-makers' reasons for this adaptations of literature can be cross commercialism as well as a high-minded respect for literary works which induce their preservation in a different medium. This paper discusses the complexities involved in the adaptation of books for children with special focus to the Spielberg movie War Horse which is an adaptation of the book by Michael Morpurgo.

Reading and Riding: Horses in Image and Text

James Tod's Rajasthan, ed. Giles Tillotson, Marg, 2007

Horses as a Genre in Tapan Ghosh's Works

Cafe DIssensus Everyday, 2020

This is a paper on Ghosh's study of horses.

Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes

InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2019

Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes is a multi-tiered essay that weaves historical accounts in relation to storytelling, science fiction, and visual culture. The various methodologies detail instances of categorization within aesthetic discourse while also narrating absence––how exclusion/inclusion as polarities create conflicting histories. The essay jumps historical time periods––a problem I attempt to navigate by focusing on particular instances and cases that relate together the "cacophony" of history, time and aesthetics (using the concept of "cacophony" in line with Jodi Byrd’s argumentation in The Transit of Empire). The essay was edited by 6 participants and colleagues, in order to treat their art, writing and work as integral to the narratives established for the service of my writing. The essay begins with a vignette on the Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, establishing a thread regarding cultural and social othering as a broader social issue, continued later in the essay specific to artistic aesthetics. Other vignettes detail structures, such as Marxist thought, the history of Western ideas like the Great Chain of Being and institutions such as the College Art Association––analyzed as participants that promote certain artists over others as hierarchicalized authentic producers of art and culture, alternately falling into dangerous territories of exotification when including subjectivities previously excluded from the canon. Systems of connoisseurship and validation (Sally Price), deference and preference within how language is a tool for "doing it right" or "wrong" (Joanna Russ), and "Liquid Blackness" (a research collective and a term used by Black Studies scholars), are themes throughout the essay that address particular artists within and aside from the canon. Additionally interspersed throughout the essay is a speculative science fiction narrative, a story that unfolds under an alternative planetary setting, where resistances to dominant cultural paradigms are taking place. The aim of this essay is to, following Byrd’s idea of "cacophony," place instances next to each other so that the tensions of the narratives might trouble the stability of monolithic canonical histories, and seek hybridity as a methodology (though admittedly troubled as well)––what Byrd describes as "opening doors," on the complex issues relevant to how colonialism, cultural othering and aesthetics are interwoven.

“Can the Horse Be Modern? Review: Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, 2019.”

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, Volume 11, No. 2. , 2020

A new collection of essays edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, responds to an increasingly robust literature on the horse in the fields of animal studies, literature, and history. The introduction challenges the speciesism implicit in the predominant periodization of modernity, which repeats "a narrative of dislocation and alienation" with respect to the natural and animal worlds at large, and the horse in particular. Titles like Farewell to the Horse (Ulrich Raulff, 2018) suggest the march towards the modern is proportionate to the declining relevance of horses, and while minding the past importance of equids, also serves as an honorable salute to their obsolescence. Guest

Writing and Rewriting the Pharmakon: The Use of Horse in Modern Nepali Fiction 14

SCHOLARS Journal of Arts & Humanities, 2024

First introduced by Jacques Derrida, the Greek usage of the concept 'pharmakon' refers to three things: either the poison, the remedy, or the scapegoat. In modern Nepali literature, the horse as pharmakon has appeared as the most self-contradictory image: it has referred to the loss, assertion, and reinforcement of honor. This paper takes BP Koirala's "The Colonel's Horse," Madan Mani Dixit's "Lattu Miyako Ghodi" [Lattu Miya's Mare], Nayan Raj Pandey's Ular [Imbalance] (1996), and Mandira Madhushree's "Budhanko Ghodi" [Budhan's Mare] (2017) to see how each of the authors makes use of a horse to discuss the modern values in Nepali society. To address this issue, the present study aims to explore the uses of horses in Nepali literature to explore the inner composition of self and the contents lying therein. On the one hand, such analysis contributes to animal studies in modern Nepali literature; on the other, it highlights the changing perceptions of horses in Nepali society. The creative artists use a particular symbol to discuss the unique contemporary phenomenon through it. The authors from Koirala to Madhushree have found the horse to be a point of departure to reflect on the modern world's inner and outer reality. On the whole, the selected Nepali literary texts treat the horse as a symbol to bring psychological and socioeconomic reality into it, thus pondering on it as a modern pharmakon in modern Nepali fiction.

Horses, gender, and (queer) masculine desire, or how experimental found footage film recycles three Hollywood films

Adaptation , 2024

Although the experimental found footage film recycles Hollywood films so that the outcome may radically differ from the original story, there are no accounts on how it adapts images from mainstream cinema to represent human–animal relations, linking to gender and masculinity. To fill this gap, I discuss how experimental film Horsey recycles footage from three Hollywood productions—Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion—to construct a new narrative, which displays a very close conformity to the prior text, shifting the focus to human–horse interactions. Raising questions about the traditional understanding, scope, and limits of adaptation in avant-garde film studies, Horsey fits in with the broader tradition of cinematic recycling of mainstream cinema as it exemplifies intertextuality as a direct form of quotation, taking quotation as appropriation through cuts, detournement, compilation and free association. Particularly, following Guy Barefoot’s understanding of adaptation as an intertextual form of recycling, Horsey is distinctive in its sole use of found footage from the three Hollywood films as it fully acknowledges the recycled material, strongly alluding to the original stories, and simultaneously re-processes them through a collage of pre-used footage, slow motion, washed-out colours, and an altered soundtrack. Despite appearing to merely extract images and sounds from Reflections, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion, Horsey emerges as a productive site for recycling Hollywood cinema, placing it into new contexts and audio-visual configurations and offering more complex, engaging ways of looking at how humans connect to horses.

A Man Called Horse: Western Melodrama and Southern Gothic

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to the Present, 2020

Haneke's Stable: The Death of the Animal and the Figuration of the Human

On Michael Haneke, eds. John David Rhodes and Brian Price (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010)