Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108581161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108581161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

Get Book Here

Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Animals, Animality, and Literature

Animals, Animality, and Literature PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108429825
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Creaturely Poetics

Creaturely Poetics PDF Author: Anat Pick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231147872
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence." With these words, she established a relationship among vulnerability, beauty, and existence that transcends the boundaries separating the species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new "poetics of species," that forces us to rethink the significance of the body, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh," or how art and culture use the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Offering a powerful alternative to more personalist visions of morality, Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts that prioritize the inhuman and challenge the familiar inventory of the human (consciousness, language, morality, and dignity). She reintroduces Weil's crucially important work and its elaboration of themes such as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, and she moves away from assumptions about animal "otherness" and nonhuman subjectivities. Pick identifies the "animal" within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her creaturely view, powerlessness is the point at which both aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

Writing Animals

Writing Animals PDF Author: Timothy C. Baker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030038807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

Animalities

Animalities PDF Author: Michael Lundblad
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474400035
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
New and cutting-edge work in animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanismRepresentations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal and animality studies, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do aanimalities animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of aMichael Field, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume also raises further questions about disciplinarity itself, while hoping to inspire further work abeyond the human in future interdisciplinary scholarship.Key Features10 provocative case studies focused on representations and discourses of animals and animality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and film in EnglishNew work from both internationally renowned and emerging figures in the burgeoning fields of animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, suggesting innovative and significant new directions to exploreBroad introduction to the kinds of questions scholars in the humanities have considered in relation to animals and animality

Species Matters

Species Matters PDF Author: Marianne DeKoven
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152825
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The question of the animal has preoccupied an increasing number of humanities, science, and social science scholars in recent years, and important work continues to expand the burgeoning field of animal studies. However, a key question still needs to be explored: Why has the academy struggled to link advocacy for animals to advocacy for various human groups? Within cultural studies, in which advocacy can take the form of a theoretical intervention, scholars have resisted arguments that add "species" to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other human-identity categories as a site for critical analysis. Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory considers whether and why cultural studies—specifically cultural theory—should pay more attention to animal advocacy and whether or why animal studies should pay more attention to questions raised by cultural theory. The contributors to this volume focus on the "humane" treatment of animals and various human groups and the implications, both theoretical and practical, of blurring the distinction between "the human" and "the animal." This anthology addresses important questions raised by the history of representing humans as the only animal capable of acting humanely, providing a framework for reconsidering the nature of humane discourse, whether in theory, literary and cultural texts, or current advocacy movements outside of the academy.

Animals and Humans in German Literature, 1800-2000

Animals and Humans in German Literature, 1800-2000 PDF Author: Lorella Bosco
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527560643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The recent emergence of the discipline of literary animal studies regards literature in itself as constitutive element of a history of knowledge. The discipline has led not only to the expansion of the corpus of texts traditionally connected with animals, but also established new concepts and methods for revising conventional cultural dichotomies (subject and object, human and animal). The 10 essays collected in this volume are devoted to a wide range of case studies on the relationship between animality and poetics in German-language literature since the 19th century. They display a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to a number of texts packed with references to animals, considered not primarily as objects of literature, but as agents endowed with an active role in the production of literature, and which have left repressed or forgotten traces in texts.

In the Skin of a Beast

In the Skin of a Beast PDF Author: Peggy McCracken
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645892X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy

Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy PDF Author: Vanessa Lemm
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230279
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides the first systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole Lemm argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. Lemm provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, Lemm gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. Lemm's book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics. This book will appeal not only to readers interested in Nietzsche, but also to anyone interested in the theme of the animal in philosophy, literature, cultural studies and the arts, as well as those interested in the relation between biological life and politics.

The Birth of a Jungle

The Birth of a Jungle PDF Author: Michael Lundblad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199917582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
According to the law of the jungle, the behavior of wild animals can be equated with natural human instincts not only for competition and reproduction, but also for violence and exploitation. Drawing on numerous novels and cultural events at the turn of the twentieth century, The Birth of a Jungle examines how the characteristics and imagery of wild animals were evoked to explore a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of African Americans. Throughout the study, Michael Lundblad emphasizes what he terms "the discourse of the jungle": Darwinist-Freudian constructions of "the human" and "the animal" that redefined various behaviors in relation to animal instincts. With nuanced, attentive readings, Lundblad reveals how these formulations of the human animal, despite reigning critical interpretations, were often contested rather than reinforced in Progressive-Era texts. Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and fiction by Jack London serve as opportunities to examine changing attitudes toward sexuality and queer desire. Works like Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth and Frank Norris's The Octopus offer insights into another type of jungle: the capitalist marketplace. The real-life electrocution of a circus elephant at Coney Island and Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic, The Jungle, inform the subsequent discussion of animalized class warfare. Understandings of race and evolution are explored through the work of William James, Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes, and the role of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925. Engagingly written and cogently argued, The Birth of a Jungle reveals the significance of animality in relation to the history of sexuality, literary naturalism, and critical race studies, while highlighting how the discourse of the jungle remains a disturbing yet powerful presence in today's culture.