Creatural Fictions

Creatural Fictions PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137518111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

Creatural Fictions

Creatural Fictions PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137518111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

Choreographies of the Living

Choreographies of the Living PDF Author: Carrie Rohman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190883197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

Narratology beyond the Human

Narratology beyond the Human PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190850426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
To what extent, and in what manner, do storytelling practices accommodate nonhuman subjects and their modalities of experience, and how can contemporary narrative study shed light on interspecies interactions and entanglements? In Narratology beyond the Human, David Herman addresses these questions through a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. Herman considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. In focusing on techniques such as the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Herman argues that existing frameworks for narrative inquiry must be modified to take into account how stories are interwoven with cultural ontologies, or understandings of what sorts of beings populate the world and how they relate to humans. Showing how questions of narrative bear on ideas of species difference and assumptions about animal minds, Narratology beyond the Human underscores our inextricable interconnectedness with other forms of creatural life and suggests that stories can be used to resituate imaginaries of human action in a more-than-human world.

Animal Comics

Animal Comics PDF Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350015326
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Animal characters abound in graphic narratives ranging from Krazy Kat and Maus to WE3 and Terra Formars. Exploring these and other multispecies storyworlds presented in words and images, Animal Comics draws together work in comics studies, narrative theory, and cross-disciplinary research on animal environments and human-animal relationships to shed new light on comics and graphic novels in which animal agents play a significant role. At the same time, the volume's international team of contributors show how the distinctive structures and affordances of graphic narratives foreground key questions about trans-species entanglements in a more-than-human world. The writers/artists covered in the book include: Nick Abadzis, Adolpho Avril, Jeffrey Brown, Sue Coe, Matt Dembicki, Olivier Deprez, J. J. Grandville, George Herriman, Adam Hines, William Hogarth, Grant Morrison, Osamu Tezuka, Frank Quitely, Yu Sasuga, Charles M. Schultz, Art Spiegelman, Fiona Staples, Ken'ichi Tachibana, Brian K. Vaughan, and others.

After the Human

After the Human PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108865151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and perspectives, it puts into dialogue the major influences from philosophy, literary study, anthropology, and science studies that set the stage for a range of new questions to be asked about the relationship of the human to other life. The book's central argument is that posthumanism's challenge to and disruption of traditional humanist knowledge is so significant as to presage a sea-change from the humanities into the posthumanities. After the Human documents the emergence of posthumanist ideas in the fractures within traditional disciplines, examines the new objects of analysis that thus came into prominence, and theorizes new interdisciplinary methods of study that followed.

Canis Modernis

Canis Modernis PDF Author: Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088389
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Modernist literature might well be accused of going to the dogs. From the strays wandering the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses to the highbred canine subject of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts. In many ways, the dog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a potent symbol of the modern condition—facing, like the human species, the problem of adapting to modernizing forces that relentlessly outpaced it. Yet the dog in literary modernism does not function as a stand-in for the human. In this book, Karalyn Kendall-Morwick examines the human-dog relationship in modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the scientific, literary, and philosophical work of Donna Haraway, Temple Grandin, and Carrie Rohman, she makes a case for the dog as a coevolutionary and coadapting partner of humans. As our coevolutionary partners, dogs destabilize the human: not the autonomous, self-transparent subject of Western humanism, the human is instead contingent, shaped by its material interactions with other species. By demonstrating how modernist representations of dogs ultimately mongrelize the human, this book reveals dogs’ status both as instigators of the crisis of the modern subject and as partners uniquely positioned to help humans adapt to the turbulent forces of modernization. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, this study shows how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic underpinnings of traditional literary forms. It will find favor with students and scholars of modernist literature and animal studies.

Novel Creatures

Novel Creatures PDF Author: Hilary Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351122053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern fiction and argues that the novels of this time reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of "creatureliness." Scholars have turned to the term "creaturely" recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms—one leading up to the turn of the century, the other after the tragic events of 9/11.

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel PDF Author: P. Vermeulen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137414537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.

Livestock and Literature

Livestock and Literature PDF Author: Liza B. Bauer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031581164
Category : Animals in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals’ commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine ‘what if’ scenarios where "livestock" practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers' understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page. Liza B. Bauer is Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking and co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research section on Human-Animal Studies at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793619204
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction ('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be possible.