Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.