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9781666963953 Academic Inspection Copy

Animal Poetics and Literary Thinking

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Animal Poetics and Literary Thinking explores and reorients our approach to animal thinking through the intersection between literary fiction, continental philosophy, and theory. This book situates animals and animality as neither a corporeal entity nor a conceptual essence, but as a scintillating "impossibility" that concurrently encourages and overturns our grasping impulse to know animals from their perspectives. This framework corresponds with the milieu of literature as poesis, which is uniquely connected to a refusal to know. By exploring the writings of J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro, this volume encounters a template of animal thinking that seeks to uncover the singularity of animals through a sustained exploration of what remains radically unknowable about animality, the vestiges of which have their presence in the world of literary fiction.
Ratul Nandi is assistant professor of English in Siliguri College, India.
"In this brilliant and provocative book, Ratul Nandi develops and deploys a notion of animal poetics to demonstrate not only that the human-animal divide is of our own making, but also that coming face-to-face with our inability to cross it, and thus encountering our own "stupidity," is our only hope for transcending it." --Kelly Oliver, Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of Animal Lessons In Animal Poetics and Literary Thinking, Nandi seeks to understand if animals can be knowable through literary fiction. In attempting to answer this question Nandi makes a clear case that anthropomorphic humanism has located animals through either their physicality or their social and literary construction. He then goes on to argue, through a close reading of three select texts, that animals are actually both more and less than these approaches would have us believe; that they are material-semiotic hybrids. Scholars and students of literature, animal studies, the humanities and arts will find this book offers a new and helpful way to consider 'animals'. --Nik Taylor, University of Canterbury
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