Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

Description

This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across 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” in 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 fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes 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 explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics.  Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts: Contestation over Species Hierarchy and CategorizationAnimal (Re)constructionsInterspecies RelationalitiesIntersectionality- Animal and Gender This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies.  Foreword Acknowledgements Contents Editor and Contributors List of Figures Animals in Posthumanist Thought: An Introduction 1 Introduction 2 The State of Animal Studies 3 The ‘Animal Turn’ 4 Different Ways of Thinking of Animals 5 On this Collected Volume: Conclusion References Contestation Over Species Hierarchy and Categorization Can Natural Theology Rethink Its Relationship with Non-human Animals? 1 Introduction: Animals in the Biblical Creation Account 2 Animals Before Domestication 3 Creation 4 ‘Animal’ Nature 5 Contingency and Paradox 6 Conclusion: Being Animals References Reassessing the Predator: Representations of Predatory Animals in John Vaillant’s The Tiger and Nate Blakeslee’s The Wolf 1 Introduction 2 Nonhuman and Human Predators 2.1 Empathizing and Learning with Predatory Animals 2.2 Exploiting Dead Animal Bodies 2.3 Predatory Animals and the Environment 3 Conclusion References Birds of a Feather: Interspecies Ethics and the Fate of Liminal Companion Animals 1 Introduction 2 Conclusion References Animal (Re)constructions Posthuman, Postanimal? Nonhuman Intelligence and Intentionality in Three Short Stories by H. G. Wells 1 Introduction 2 Three Nonhuman Narratives 3 Conclusion References The Snake Has a Face: Levinas, Mondo, and the Suffering Non-human Animal 1 Introduction 2 Levinas and the Dwelling 3 The Non-Human and the Ethical Command 4 A Dog’s World 5 The Language of the Eyes 6 World and Soul 7 Conclusion References Bowers of Persuasion: Toward a Posthuman Visual Rhetoric 1 Introduction 2 Visual Rhetoric and Nonhuman Animals 3 The Bowers of the Birds 4 Flowers and Fruit and Fungus—Oh, My!: Analysis of the Bowers 4.1 Aesthetics and Influence 4.2 Cultural Preferences 4.3 Communicative Purpose 5 What Does It All Mean?: Implications for Posthuman Visual Rhetoric References Jacques Derrida and the Autobiographical (Non-human) Animal: An Analysis of (False) Animal Autobiographies 1 Introduction 2 What is an Animal Autobiography? 3 The White Bone: Elephants and Religion 4 Translating Animal Languages 5 Conclusion References Interspecies Relationalities “Neigh Way, Jose”: Posthuman Communication in BoJack Horseman 1 Introduction 2 Queer Aesthetics in Posthuman Animation 3 Relating to Animals, the Failure of Language 4 Troubling the Pastoral (or Perhaps Not) 5 Conclusion References Understanding Across Differences in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Les neuf consciences du Malfini and in Dany Laferrière’s Autoportrait de Paris avec Chat 1 Introduction 2 Amplifying with Animals 3 The Style of Telling 4 Conclusion References Human-Animal Relationality: Artistic Travels Through a Subculture’s Imaginations 1 Historical Bestiaries: An Introduction 2 A Contemporary Bestiary 3 Reading Art—Reading Theory 4 Moral Geographies 5 Knights, Dragons and Others 6 Beuys’ Interspecies Performances 7 Ownership and Companionship 8 Conclusion References The Animal Survives: Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron Intervenes as Survivor of the Industrialized World 1 Introduction 2 Jewett’s “A White Heron” 3 Sylvia’s Woods 4 The Hunter Naturalist 5 Sylvia’s Ascension 6 Conclusion References Intersectionality-Gender and the Nonhuman Into the Woods: The Creaturely and the Queer in 20th Century US American Hunting Narratives 1 Introduction: Men in the Woods 2 Into the Big Woods: Wilderness Masculinity and Its Creaturely Others in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. 3 Are We not Men?: Mailer and Dickey Queer the Woods 4 Queering the Outdoors in Why Are We in Vietnam? 5 Queer Predators and the Return of the Frontier in James Dickey's Deliverance 6 Conclusion: The Creaturely and the Queer References Madness, Femininity, Vegetarianism: Post-anthropocentric Representations in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor 1 Introduction 2 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Rebellious Femininity and Animal Rights Activism 3 The “Madness” of Film Adaptation 4 Conclusion References The Bird and Eye: Kinship with Birds as Proto-ecofeminist Discourse of Liberation in George Meredith’s The Egoist 1 Introduction 2 The Struggle to Reach Avian Kinship: Clara 3 Avian Metaphors as Mockery: Willoughby 4 Conclusion References