Melancholia's Dog

An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholia's Dog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts-the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.

"Melancholia's Dog reminds us of how much we share with the beasts around us, how much of our 'mortality and vulnerability' speaks to theirs. It is a lesson that transcends boundaries, both of species and professional idiom, and Alice A. Kuzniar does her audience a distinct service by reminding us of it." (Modern Philology) "This is probably the first time that a scholar of Alice A. Kuzniar's ability has shown the courage to tackle the deeper aspects of our relationship with dogs.... Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps we didn't want to face it. Thanks to Kuzniar, we know it now." (London Review of Books)"

Alice A. Kuzniar is professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.