Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman (original) (raw)
Literary Animal Studies in 2012: Where We Are, Where We Are Going
Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 2012
Literary Animal Studies began, as did most of the disciplines that contribute to Animal Studies and Human-Animal Studies, in the 1980s. That era of raised social-consciousness opened academic disciplines to many new perspectives. The unique contribution Animal Studies made was to suggest that other-than-human perspectives not only existed but could expand and enhance human consciousness beyond what since the Middle Ages had been believed to be the impermeable boundary between human and animal. Increased knowledge and awareness of nonhuman possibility came and continues to come from virtually every existing academic discipline. What Literary Animal Studies contributes to the mix is the news that the arts, their roots in humans' earliest response to the world and those they shared it with, still retain the power to rekindle that deep time when the boundary between human and animal was permeable, when humans knew they were one among many other animals, and anthropocentrism had not yet emerged to deny that kinship.
The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 10.1 , 2012
Animal Ethics and Literary Criticism
(on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am [New York: Fordham UP, 2008]; Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: Posthumanism and the Discourse of Species [Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003]; Carrie Rohman’s, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal [New York: Columbia UP, 2009); and Philip Armstrong’s, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity [London: Routledge, 2008])
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
Jodey Castricano frames her fascinating edited anthology, Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, as an intervention into cultural studies, or more precisely, a challenge to cultural studies scholars. "Simply put," she reflects, "the aim of this collection is to include the non-human animal question as part of the ethical purview of cultural studies" (7). Specifically, the text attempts to demonstrate the relevance of the question to a field that has conventionally critiqued the human subject, centrally interrogating the ways in which the traditionally unmarked category is, in fact, particularly constructed through power-laden gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed discourses. The text illuminates the limits of cultural studies which, despite its scholarly and political impact, nonetheless reproduces a politics of exclusion in regard to non-human animals. Such disavowal helps reproduce an essential border against which "the human" of the humanist tradition can be sustained. As Cary Wolfe notes (2003),
Animals in Posthumanist Thought: An Introduction
Second Language Learning and Teaching
This book brings together well-researched essays by established scholars as well as forward-thinking aspiring researchers to study how literary and non-literary texts highlight 'animal presence' and explore non-anthropocentric relationships between human and animals. To be precise, it offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric Literary and Cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts beyond geographical and period boundaries, and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "Animal turn" for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book will constitute a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed; and they explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics. This book does more than simply decentering the 'human' by bringing animals onto the center of critical discourse and challenging the anthropocentric hierarchical relationship, which are the basis of Posthumanist readings. It also highlights the theoretical intersections between Animal Theory and other relevant cultural theories, that is the latest advancement in this field. The volume is divided into four main sections
This was a big international exhibition addressing the question of how contemporary artists respond to the often conflicted ideas we have about nonhuman animals and the contradictory tensions in the field of human-animal relations
Hypatia Reviews Online
Thinking Animals is an exploration of the space between a theoretical rock and a hard place. Kari Weil's project engages the impasse between the modernist understanding of relations between animals and humans (with its attendant humanism) and the postmodern breakdown of categories like "animal" and "human" (and the resulting lack of guidance as to how to conduct relationships between these groups). Because the scope of these essays is so broad and encompasses so many issues, this review attempts to bring to light one of the many narratives encompassed by this book. The basic problem with which Thinking Animals grapples is this: On the one hand, humanism has provided us codes of behavior and ethics but only at the expense of elevating human importance above that of nonhuman animals. Modernism delineated the problem of our relationship to nonhuman animals by reinforcing a category of "we" who must behave ethically, and a category of "the other" to whom we do or do not behave in such a way. Modernism must treat the categories of human and animal as "real" so as to give force to moral requirements. Modernism, in other words, reinforces the idea of human exceptionalism.
Language & Ecology Journal, 2022
According to Margulis, Wong, Simchy-Gross and McAuley, humans possess a tendency to narrativize abstract events. In their 2019 paper, the authors point out that when we face any type of chaotic information, we infer a narrative. The tendency to transform unknown information into narratives shapes the way people make sense of their lives and the way we interact among us humans and with other species: characters, events, context. We assign roles in our stories even to rocks, rivers, tables and chairs. Narratives and stories not only help us relate with the world around us, but they make us understand and empathize. We can figure out something about the characters in a story by the unfolding events, and vice versa, the type of characters may suggest a plot. We can also foresee upcoming events due to our experience with previous narratives. But the most important thing about narratives is how they make us feel. We get involved in social action because we care, because we feel something that happened to others may happen to us or someone we love. In this sense, Writing for Animals: An anthology for writers and instructors to educate and inspire is a toolbox for writers and communicators but also a guide on how to build bridges between non-human animals and a human-dominated world. The book starts with an invitation to rethink the way we relate with other species and the part they play in our lives. In the introduction, John Yunker reminds us how much we talk and write about animals and yet how little we really know them, or rather, how little we think about their needs, emotions and intelligence. Yunker takes the opportunity to point out to the difference between writing for animals and writing about them. In doing so, he makes his ecosophy explicit while he invites us to include animals in our narratives and lives by taking a look at their world, not adopting a dominating perspective but through the ethnographer's vision. The internal structure of the book suggests a journey following this perspective: it starts with the place of the writer in the narratives and ends with a description of the impact they can achieve in the world.
Introduction: Animal (As) Writing, Writing (As) Animal
Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2021
In '"But as for me, who am I (following)?"', the second section of The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida contextualises his interest in a certain passage in Plato's Phaedrus as a systematic interest in what he calls 'the animality of writing': What is terrible about writing, Socrates says, is the fact that, like painting (zōgraphia), the things it engenders, although similar to living things, do not respond. No matter what questions one asks them, writings remain silent, keeping a most majestic silence or else always replying in the same terms, which means not replying. 1
What Kind of Literary Animal Studies Do We Want, Or Need?
A review of Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett and Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. xv + 230 pp. and Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers. Berkley: U of California P, 2012. x + 131 pp.
Writing for Animals: An anthology for writers and instructors to educate and inspire
Writing for Animals, 2018
The more we study animals, the smarter they get. My introduction from the anthology from Ashland Creek Press. Here's a full description: A unique anthology of articles and essays to inspire animal-themed creative writing Despite all we know about the sentience of animals, society tends to view and treat nonhuman animals as lesser creatures. And for society to change its views, writers must change their views. We must look closely at how we depict animals and ask ourselves difficult questions. For example, are we using animals for our writing in a way that is authentic and fair? Or are we using them for our own purposes, leading to further misconceptions and abuses? As our awareness awakens about animals’ intelligence, sensitivity, and social and emotional lives, literature is beginning to reflect this change in awareness. Yet little has been written about the process of writing about animals, from crafting point of view to giving animals realistic voices. Writers face many questions and choices in their work, from how to educate without being didactic to how to develop animals as characters for an audience that still views them as ingredients. In this book, writers will find myriad voices to assist them in writing about animals, from tips about craft to understanding the responsibility of writing about animals. Articles & Contributors Do We Have the Right to Write About Animals? Joanna Lilley Animals that Work in Stories Lisa Johnson A Case for More Reality in Writing for Animals Rosemary Lombard Meeting the Wild Things Where They Are Kipp Wessel Rewilding Literature: Catalyzing Compassion for Wild Predators through Creative Nonfiction Paula MacKay Rabies Bites: How Stephen King Made a Dog a Compelling Main Character Hannah Sandoval Real Advocacy within Fantasy Worlds Beth Lyons Writing Animals Where You Are Hunter Liguore Other Nations Marybeth Holleman Giving Animals a Voice: Letters from an Ashland Deer John Yunker No One Mourns an Unnamed Animal: Why Naming Animals Might Help Save Them Midge Raymond Are You Willing? Sangamithra Iyer With a Hope to Change Things: An Exploration of the Craft of Writing about Animals with the Founders of Zoomorphic Magazine Alex Lockwood
Imagining More Than Humans: A Re-Imagining of Animal Existence
To believe that mankind, specifically humans exist in vacuum is an erroneous take on the world and the way that it normally functions. In reality, humans can never achieve the perfect image of an autonomous separate being, rather they embody one of the threads that are strictly interwoven within the larger fabric of planetary life. The amalgamation of human, environment, and nonhuman animals encompass the philosophy of existence eliminating that each of these forces is absolute. This paper, through the theory of Ecocriticism, illuminates how nonhuman subjects and human individuals interact with one another through the lens of its sister discipline in humanities: Animal Studies, explaining how the portrait of the animal shapes human realities in the more than human world by undoing the nature-culture binary. Through the analysis of separate scientific data, books, and articles the central interests of this study firmly rest upon the pillar of three main beliefs discussed: (1) the issue of Otherness and Anthropocentric Mastery, (2) Ecofeminism as Speciesism, and (3) Art as form of resistance: the history of representation and the misrepresentation of the nonhuman animal in visual media. The confluence behind these areas offer up an array of novel perspectives, insights, and answers on how the human world and the natural world of nonhuman animals are two sides of the same coin with similar histories, sufferings, and an unwavering thirst for life.
Not Coming to Terms: Nonhuman Animals and the Edge of Theory
In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle's and Heidegger's approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of "the animals" keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.
Humanimalia, 2022
Review of: Chiara Mengozzi (ed.): Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human–Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, Routledge, London, 2021, 283 pages.
Animal Others-Editors' Introduction
Hypatia, 2012
When Jeremy Bentham wrote his oft-cited words challenging the rationality of denying concern for an individual's suffering simply because "of the blackness of the skin" or "the number of legs" he also suggested that attitudes and legislation that allowed such irrationality amounted to "tyranny." 1 Peter Singer, who is the most prominent contemporary Benthamite, as it were, begins the preface to Animal Liberation with "This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans" (Singer 1975, vii). Working to end animal suffering and combating human tyranny, particularly as this occurs in intensive agriculture, the entertainment industries, and biomedical research, have served as the practical goals of the animal liberation movement, These goals and their philosophical underpinnings have been interrogated, alternatively interpreted, and challenged both inside and outside of the academy. Some of the most penetrating criticisms of what might be called the mainstream philosophical position on animal ethics first came from feminist theorists who were equally concerned about the mistreatment of other animals and who often shared the practical goals of the animal liberation movement. 2 The pioneers of this critique were Marti Kheel, whose writing in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the development of ecofeminist ethics (Kheel 1985; 1988; 1993; 2004; 2008) (and to whose memory this special issue is dedicated); Carol Adams, whose early work drawing connections between intersecting oppressions initially appeared in radical feminist publications such as WomanSpirit and Heresies and then in her important 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams 1976; 1987; 1990); and Josephine Donovan, whose publication of "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory" in Signs in 1990 brought the issues into academic feminist discussions and helped generate what is now called the feminist care tradition in animal ethics (Donovan 1990). Hypatia also published some of the early criticism of mainstream approaches to thinking about the more than human world.
we , animals. Artistic Positions on Human-Animal Relations. (catalogue)
The concept for the project and exhibition series »we , animals« is based on a view of human-animal relations as defined in Human-Animal Studies. They are viewed as having developed over the course of history, being in a constant state of flux and which, in our dealings with animals, are continuously being produced and reproduced anew. Addressing the agency of animals in societal spaces leads to one of the core issues: how can we perceive animals as independent actors within historical, social and cultural processes? For the five projects I invited 10 artists whose works reflect upon our language and actions concerning animals on a daily basis. They throw light on specific interactions, human misconceptions and contradictions in relation to animals. They challenge the rigid categories that are applied to animals as working animals, livestock, mythical figures, pets or beasts. Their scientific references and performative or activist approaches helped shape the curatorial concept. This catalogue published by the curator Anne Hoelck documents the selected artistic contributions to the current debate on human-animal relations. It is enriched by the essays »Deconstructing the Anthropological Machine« by Jessica Ullrich and »Animal Biographies« by Stephan Zandt.
2018
Please see website for details: https://www.creaturelyethicsconferencestream.com The application of a more embodied approach to ethics that also accounts for both animal and animalised humans can be found in the work of Pick (2011), she calls a creaturely ethics that takes the position that living beings, regardless of being human or not, are vulnerable beings prone to violent forces. Her work blurs the divide between the ontological status of both animals and humans, which can be the starting point of our discussions in this stream. Pick believes that individuals and societies have an obligation to try and protect vulnerable beings from violent exposure and exploitation. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, Pick further argues for ‘creaturely poetics’ for ‘the creature, then, is first and foremost a living – body – material, temporal, and vulnerable’ (p. 5). At the same time, vulnerability is not a mundane fact of life. Weil (1953 as cited in Pick, 2011, p. 3) believes that: “[T]he vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is the mark of existence.” At the first instance, it seems counter-intuitive to conceive of the vulnerability of living beings as beautiful, particularly when violence is inflicted upon them. But if, as Pick (2011) argues, “fragility and finitude possess a special kind of beauty, this conception of beauty is already inherently ethical. It implies a sort of sacred recognition (our emphasis) of life’s value as material and temporal” (3). In turn, this understanding of sacredness invites a reverence for the lives of others for it encourages a mode of thought that in our view, is an expansive love, to some even reflecting a form of divine suffering (Linzey, 2009). A type of love born out of the sharing of organizational space (O’Doherty, 2016), inspired by a caring ethic that heightens visibility and moral consideration (Connolly & Cullen, 2017) or ethical affordances (Warkentin, 2009) to other-than-human animals. Arising from this embodied ‘moral imagination’ (Hamington, 2008) which these relationships bring forth, empathy and care can extend beyond previously considered limitations to animals, but also certain groups of humans as well or at some intersection of the two. Afterall, a number of poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida (1997/2008, 2009) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987), have emphasised the continuity between human and non-human animals in addition to developing critiques of anthropocentrism. The convenors of this stream welcome submissions that explore the vulnerability of diverse subjects, within multiple contexts and different disciplinary fields of study. This includes disciplines that are not traditionally associated with management and organizational studies, such as anthropology, history, film studies, art, ethnic and racial studies, ecological studies, cultural studies, queer studies, settler and colonial studies, indigenous studies, literature and health care. The overarching aim is to wrestle with the idea of the vulnerability of life and consider the possibility of sustaining ethical relations between beings that are intrinsically motivated by love, but often exists in contexts that are not always conducive to sustaining such relations. Hence, submissions to this stream could consider how an organizational, institutional or industrial context plays some role in hindering and/or facilitating ethical relationships in multiple contexts or settings.
Art Education Beyond Anthropocentricism: The Question of Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Art and Its Education, 2020
In this article, I explore human relationships to nonhuman animals through posthumanism, contemporary art, and critical animal studies (CAS), offering perspectives for contemporary art education beyond anthropocentricism. I investigate the question of human–nonhuman animal relationships by discussing the ideas of posthumanism and speciesism as forms of discrimination, similar to other forms of oppression. Challenging the grounds of discrimination leads to a better understanding of human relationships with nonhuman lives. Given the environmental, ecological, ethical, and social justice concerns of our current times, I argue that posthumanism and CAS offer a specific entry point for contemporary art education theory and practice. Humanist understanding and superiority over nonhuman animals are problematized through discussing artwork by four artists. The discussion concentrates on how art education might become an important site through which to challenge the issues of animal subjection and human relationships with the other inhabitants of this planet.
With the formation of the interdisciplinary field 'Animal Studies,' animals are increasingly moving into the purview of literary and cultural studies. In the environmental humanities, an animal oriented perspective is beginning to establish itself as a dynamic and productive sub-field. Greg Garrard, for example, devotes an entire chapter to animals in Ecocriticism (2012). The way humans read animals shapes culture just as much as culture shapes the way we read animals (Baker in Garrard, 153). This mutually constitutive relationship makes 'animal' a central trope in environmental thinking and discourse. In this workshop, we want to take a closer look at how Ecocriticism and the theoretical and methodological concerns of Animal Studies can interact productively with each other. What links Ecocriticism and Animal Studies is the concern with the politics of representation that shape human interactions, material and discursive, with animals. The conceptual separation of the human animal from non-human animals is at the center of most mainstream environmental and philosophical thinking. In continental European thought, human exceptionalism is based on a variety of concepts, such as that of an immortal soul, existential freedom, or symbolic language. With its roots in the Enlightenment tradition, human exceptionalism still informs most scholarly practice in the humanities and underwrites even theoretical approaches that are interested in conceptualizing nonhuman forms of subjectivity, as posthumanist scholar Cary Wolfe points out in his seminal monograph Animal Rites (18). In this tradition, the ways in which humans relate to animals are predominantly shaped by a presumed hierarchy in which animals rank below humans. From the prevalent utilitarian perspective, animals are regarded primarily as a resource for human use, which finds expression in cultural practices like animal husbandry (esp. raising animals for human consumption) or the display of animals in zoos but also in the ways humans relate to animals through language. During this workshop, the linguistic, textual, and visual expressions of animal imaginaries that illustrate and comment on, and at the same time influence and shape, human-animal-relationships are at the center of our concern.