Beyond the Human-Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture

327 Pages·2017·3.48 MB·English

by  Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch (eds.)

Beyond the
Human-Animal
Divide
Creaturely Lives in
Literature and Culture
Edited by
Dominik Ohrem and
Roman Bartosch
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
English Department
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffeld
Sheffeld, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffeld
Sheffeld, UK
Before the 2000s the humanities and social sciences paid little attention to the
participation of non-human animals in human cultures. The entrenched idea of
the human as a unique kind of being nourished a presumption that Homo sapi-
ens should be the proper object of study for these felds, to the exclusion of lives
beyond the human. Against this background, various academic disciplines can now
be found in the process of executing an ‚‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and
philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the animal
presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Instances of such work are grouped under the umbrella term
‘animal studies’, having largely developed in relation to a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of
the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our
relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency
of animals in human cultures? While debates around these themes continue to
develop across academic disciplines, this series will publish work that looks, more
specifcally, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the feld of English Studies.
Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from
other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode
of communication of a wholly other order. Literature, as the apogee of linguis-
tic expression in its complexity and subtlety, may therefore seem a point at which
‘the human’ seems farthest removed from the world of ‘the animal’. Our primary
motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English
Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter.
Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor
(that is, as signs of specifcally human concerns), this series signifcantly extends
the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of
such fguration with the material lives of animals. The series will encourage the
examination of textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy
with non-human animal and advance understanding of how the aesthetic engage-
ments of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history.
Consequently, we will publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts across the chronological range of English studies from the Middle Ages to
the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres
and critical methods. This will be the frst series to explore animal studies within
the context of literary studies; together, the volumes (comprising monographs,
edited collections of essays and some shorter studies in the Palgrave Pivot format)
will constitute a uniquely rich and thorough scholarly resource on the involvement
of animals in literature. The series will focus on literary prose and poetry, while
also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and
contexts (from theatre and flm to fne art, journalism, the law, popular writing
and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14649
Dominik Ohrem · Roman Bartosch
Editors
Beyond the Human-
Animal Divide
Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture
Editors
Dominik Ohrem Roman Bartosch
School of History Faculty of Philosophy
University of Cologne University of Cologne
Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen
Germany Germany
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-1-137-60309-8 ISBN 978-1-349-93437-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950701
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Preface
Research in the feld of human–animal studies is thriving, presenting us
with a rich variety of perspectives that help us make sense of the intri-
cate naturalcultural relations between human beings and the multispe-
cies world(s) around them. The creaturely is one of the concepts through
which current research in the humanities tackles the “question of the
animal” in ways that bring together historical, philosophical, philologi-
cal, and theological strands of thought in fruitful and productive ways. In
the context of the broader critique of the anthropocentric purview of the
humanities and attempts at moving in the direction of a post- or envi-
ronmental humanities, it challenges us to rethink disciplinary boundaries,
draw on the potentials of interdisciplinary exchange, and grapple with
the normative and ethical dimensions of scholarship. As a way of think-
ing beyond the anthropocentric notion of a supposed “divide” between
humans and other creatures—an idea that is ridden with ambivalence,
contradiction, and undecidability but nonetheless has been foundational
to the dominant strands of Western thought—the notion of the crea-
turely informs the contributions in this volume in different ways. Some
of them engage with the concept explicitly, whereas others can them-
selves be read as examples of creaturely ways of thinking and writing—of
storying—(in) a distinctly more-than-human world now more than ever
imperiled by anthropogenic-induced calamity. Thus, this volume also
seeks to explore how not only fctional narrative but all kinds of writing,
from historiography to ethnography and philosophical argument, partake
in such forms of postanthropocentric storying, i.e., how they, through
v
vi PREFACE
their distinctive patterns and strategies, allow us to make sense of the
creaturely life we share with other animals.
We thank all of our contributors for the willingness to engage with
this particular set of questions, and we are very happy to have been given
the opportunity to contribute to this exchange of ideas in the context of
the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series. In particular, we
thank the series editors, Susan McHugh, Bob McKay, and John Miller,
for their encouragement, helpful advice, and continuous support from
the conceptual beginnings of our project to the completion of this book.
We also thank Emily Janakiram and Allie Bochicchio from Palgrave
Macmillan for guiding us through the different stages of the publica-
tion process as well as the numerous colleagues who offered advice and
(anonymous) reviews that helped us bring the volume into shape.
Cologne, Germany Dominik Ohrem
Roman Bartosch
contents
Part I Animating Creaturely Life: Ontology and Ethics
Beyond Anthropocentrism
Animating Creaturely Life 3
Dominik Ohrem
Earth Ethics and Creaturely Cohabitation 21
Kelly Oliver
An Address from Elsewhere: Vulnerability, Relationality,
and Conceptions of Creaturely Embodiment 43
Dominik Ohrem
“Creature Comforts”: Crafting a Common Language
Across the Species Divide 77
Randy Malamud
Cuts: The Rhythms of “Healing-with” Companion Animals 95
Elizabeth Pattinson
A Dog’s Death: Art as a Work of Mourning 113
Jessica Ullrich
vii
viii CONTENTS
Playing like a Loser 141
Tom Tyler
Part II Storying Creaturely Life: Writing/Reading
Animality and Human–Animal Relations
Storying Creaturely Life 153
Roman Bartosch
The Collaborative Craft of Creaturely Writing 167
Alex Lockwood
Animals as Signifers: Re-Reading Michel Foucault’s
The Order of Things as a Genealogical Working Tool
for Historical Human–Animal Studies 189
Mieke Roscher
Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the
Creaturely Potential of Focalization 215
Roman Bartosch
Creaturely Apotheosis: Posthumanist Vulnerability
in Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja 239
Peter J. Meedom
“The Impulse Towards Silence”: Creaturely Expressivity
in Beckett and Coetzee 265
Joseph Anderton
Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance
to Metaphor 283
Kári Driscoll
CONTENTS ix
Part III Afterword
Thinking about Talking about Writing about … “Animals” 309
Jane Desmond
Index 317