Beyond the Human-Animal Divide

Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture

Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch, Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137603098
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349934379
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.  

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• Editors and contributors
• List of Figures
• Part I Animating Creaturely Life: Ontology and Ethics Beyond Anthropocentrism
• Animating Creaturely Life
• Earth Ethics and Creaturely Cohabitation
• An Address from Elsewhere: Vulnerability, Relationality, and Conceptions of Creaturely Embodiment
• “Creature Comforts”: Crafting a Common Language Across the Species Divide
• Cuts: The Rhythms of “Healing-with” Companion Animals
• A Dog’s Death: Art as a Work of Mourning
• Playing like a Loser
• Part II Storying Creaturely Life: WritingReading Animality and Human–Animal Relations
• Storying Creaturely Life
• The Collaborative Craft of Creaturely Writing
• Animals as Signifiers: Re-Reading Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things as a Genealogical Working Tool for Historical Human–Animal Studies
• Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalization
• Creaturely Apotheosis: Posthumanist Vulnerability in Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja
• “The Impulse Towards Silence”: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee
• Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor
• Part III Afterword
• Thinking about Talking about Writing about … “Animals”
• Index