Hunters as Prey: Animal Poetics in the Myth of Actaeon and Artemis and Its Rewritings

This chapter explores textual examples of how poets and theorists from antiquity to the twenty-first century have conducted soundings of sexualized visual interspecies violence by rewriting the hunting myth of Artemis (Diana) and Actaeon. Providing close readings of passages from Ovid, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Klossowski, Thomas Kling, and others and establishing an interpretive dialogue with recent animal studies theories, coupled with Wilfred R. Bion’s undogmatic approach to psychoanalysis, the chapter examines the degree to which rewritings of Actaeon’s trauma insist on gender and interspecies permeability and dissolve distinctive boundaries between prey and hunter/predator.