Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

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

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad, 2017

The End of the Animal--Literary and Cultural Animalities

“Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” argues that posthumanist theory, and the interrelated field of animal studies, have been patterned by a lacuna, namely that of race. More precisely, I argue that posthumanism’s disengagement with theorizations of race and colonialism has not only undercut our understanding of the significance of posthumanism for embattled subjectivities but also undermined the stated aims of posthumanist theory itself. With the recent emergence of feminist and queer posthumanist theory attentive to race, the future direction of posthumanism and animal studies promises an exciting break with habits of racialized erasure in posthumanist thought.

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.

Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.

Lo sguardo – rivista di filosofia, 2017

The so-called 'animal turn' of the past couple of decades brought about a new focus on animals and animality that traverses the whole spectrum of the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Certainly part of a wider cultural phenomenon – the crisis of humanism in late twentieth century –, it has in turn influenced and transformed posthumanist thought itself, not only enabling it to probe the boundaries of the 'human', but also partially reorienting it towards questions of immanence, embodiment, affects, and providing a more marked ethical and political impulse. On the other hand, the encounter with posthumanism brought to the new discipline of Animal Studies the awareness of the limits of the traditional, still very humanist approaches to animal ethics, and of the necessity of an overcoming of the humanist paradigm, of a new theoretical and methodological approach.

This article aims at showing how contemporary literary responses to human-nonhuman primate relationships can be as valid a form of thinking about the animal as the philosophical and scientific roots of movements such as the Great Ape Project. Traditionally the ape has been the source of stories that question the definition of the human. Since the beginning of the modern animal liberation movement in the 1970s and thanks to the development of scientific fields such as cognitive ethology, primatology, and trans-species psychology, some fiction writers have produced works that develop alternative ways of thinking about the nonhuman primate. In order to understand the transformative power of the literary imagination this article first offers a short reflection on the connections between the posthuman turn and the development of literary animal studies. Secondly, after commenting on the main narratives that have nourished our relationship with nonhuman apes since the eighteenth century, it presents an overview of the main ape motifs that populate Anglophone literatures. And finally, it argues that literature compels us to transcend the category “human” and enter into a posthuman age that philosophers such as Cary Wolfe or Rosi Braidotti acknowledge as more in tune with the reality of who we are as a species: multiply hybridized in our constant interactions with nonhuman beings. Keywords: primate literature, literary animal studies, posthumanism, posthuman humanities, cyborg posthumanism, animot posthumanism, animal ethics, species boundary, animal liberation, ecocriticism.

(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])

Transylvanian Review, 2023

Voicing the literary animal is a task of immense responsibility. Exploring two eighteenth-century novels, namely The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784) and Biography of a Spaniel (1797), this essay aims to analyze the use of nonhuman narrators and their surfacing insights into humananimal relationality. By employing Hanna Meretoja’s concept of “narrative hermeneutics” and Anat Pick’s “creaturely poetics,” the analysis questions the ways in which animalographies empower the voices and agency of nonhuman entities in literature and shift the narrative away from a human-centric one to a more inclusive, multispecies one. To this end, the literary animal’s employment and portrayal delimitates ethical spheres of interaction within the narrative, reassessing the hierarchical model constructed by anthropocentrism and challenging the traditional, dominant narrative that prioritizes human experience and perception.

Journal of Animal Ethics, 2021