Creatural Fictions

Creatural Fictions PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137518111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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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 : 290

Get Book

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.

Equine Fictions

Equine Fictions PDF Author: Jopi Nyman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527533212
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This innovative volume approaches the intriguing relationship between humans and horses in 21st-century Anglophone fiction and autobiography from the perspectives of affect and politics. It addresses the strong emotional power attached to the human-horse bond, and contextualizes horse narratives within debates concerning identity and its politics. The in-depth analysis deals with topics such as the intertwinement of humans and animals, healing, mourning, and nostalgia in horse narratives, and the formation of gendered and national identities. The volume pays particular attention to life writing by Susan Richards, Rupert Isaacson, and Buck Brannaman, fiction by Gillian Mears and Jane Smiley, and Follyfoot fanfiction. Because of its focus on narratives telling of today’s human-horse encounters and its explicit attention to diverse textual forms, this book represents a unique contribution to the study of human-horse encounters in contemporary writing, and will be of particular use to scholars working in human-animal studies, Anglophone literature, and American studies.

Language in Place

Language in Place PDF Author: Daniela Francesca Virdis
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260168
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The contributions in this collection offer a wide range of stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment, by focusing on a variety of text-types ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and exhibitions. Employing both established and cutting-edge methodologies from, among others, corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, Text World Theory and ecostylistics, the eleven chapters in the volume provide an overview of how landscape, place and environment are encoded and can be investigated in literary and non-literary discourse. The studies collected here stand as evidence of the possibility of, and the need for, a “stylistics of landscape”, which emphasises how represented spaces are made manifest linguistically; a “stylistics of place”, which focuses on the discursive and affective qualities of those represented spaces; and a “stylistics of environment”, which reiterates the urgency for environmentally-responsible humanities, able to support a change in the anthropocentric narrative which poses humans as the most important variable in the human-animal and human-environment relationships.

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: Lexington Books
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.

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction

Gender and Environment in Science Fiction PDF Author: Bridgitte Barclay
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498580580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book examines the often-complex relationships between issues of gender and the environment in science fiction films and fiction. Its contributors discuss a range of texts: early apocalyptic science fiction, campy midcentury science fiction films, Silver Age superhero comics, and twenty-first-century science fiction films and literature.

Beyond the Human-Animal Divide

Beyond the Human-Animal Divide PDF Author: Dominik Ohrem
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349934372
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world. The text explores written work such as Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, video media such as the film "Creature Comforts" and the video game Into the Dead, and photography. With chapters written by an international group of philosophers, literary and cultural studies scholars, historians and others, the volume brings together established experts and forward-thinking early career scholars to provide an interdisciplinary engagement with ways of thinking and writing the creaturely to establish a postanthropocentric sense of human-animal relationality.

Canis Modernis

Canis Modernis PDF Author: Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271088400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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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 : 164

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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.

Narratology Beyond the Human

Narratology Beyond the Human PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019085040X
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.

Choreographies of the Living

Choreographies of the Living PDF Author: Carrie Rohman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190604425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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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.