Kafka's Zoopoetics

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Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472902091
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis Kafka's Zoopoetics by : Naama Harel

Download or read book Kafka's Zoopoetics written by Naama Harel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Kafka's Zoopoetics

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Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472126512
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Kafka's Zoopoetics by : Naama Harel

Download or read book Kafka's Zoopoetics written by Naama Harel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

What Is Zoopoetics?

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319644165
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

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Book Synopsis What Is Zoopoetics? by : Kári Driscoll

Download or read book What Is Zoopoetics? written by Kári Driscoll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism.

Zoopoetics

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Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739186639
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis Zoopoetics by : Aaron M. Moe

Download or read book Zoopoetics written by Aaron M. Moe and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species’ poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the material makings of poetry. Moreover, as many species are makers, zoopoetics expands the poetic tradition to include nonhuman poiesis.

Kafka’s Nonhuman Form

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 331940394X
Total Pages : 129 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis Kafka’s Nonhuman Form by : Ted Geier

Download or read book Kafka’s Nonhuman Form written by Ted Geier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a compact study of Kafka’s inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought—his nonhuman form—that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka’s oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka’s literary, “nonhuman” form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka’s works and engaging with Kafka’s original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka’s sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the “Kafkaesque”.

Jackals and Arabs

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Author :
Publisher : BoD E-Short
ISBN 13 : 3734758459
Total Pages : 8 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis Jackals and Arabs by : Franz Kafka

Download or read book Jackals and Arabs written by Franz Kafka and published by BoD E-Short. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jackals and Arabs" (German: "Schakale und Araber") is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly "Der Jude". It appeared again in the collection "Ein Landarzt" ("A Country Doctor") in 1919.

Kafka Translated

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441131957
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Kafka Translated by : Michelle Woods

Download or read book Kafka Translated written by Michelle Woods and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka Translated is the first book to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do the translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics? Michelle Woods investigates issues central to the burgeoning field of translation studies: the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. She specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, as well as two contemporary translators, Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann, and how their work might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work.

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501776517
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernism's Inhuman Worlds by : Rasheed Tazudeen

Download or read book Modernism's Inhuman Worlds written by Rasheed Tazudeen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

Animal Encounters

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004168672
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Animal Encounters by : Tom Tyler

Download or read book Animal Encounters written by Tom Tyler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, a ~the animala (TM). These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110314592
Total Pages : 726 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology by : Hubert Zapf

Download or read book Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology written by Hubert Zapf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

Rhetorical Speculations

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Publisher : University Press of Colorado
ISBN 13 : 1607328313
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Rhetorical Speculations by : Scott Sundvall

Download or read book Rhetorical Speculations written by Scott Sundvall and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm

Animal Narratology

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Author :
Publisher : MDPI
ISBN 13 : 3039283480
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (392 download)

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Book Synopsis Animal Narratology by : Joela Jacobs

Download or read book Animal Narratology written by Joela Jacobs and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.

Kafka Translated

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441133445
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Kafka Translated by : Michelle Woods

Download or read book Kafka Translated written by Michelle Woods and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka Translated is the first book to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do the translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics? Michelle Woods investigates issues central to the burgeoning field of translation studies: the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. She specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, as well as two contemporary translators, Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann, and how their work might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work.

Outside the Anthropological Machine

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100007501X
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Outside the Anthropological Machine by : Chiara Mengozzi

Download or read book Outside the Anthropological Machine written by Chiara Mengozzi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.

A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke

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Author :
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804041164
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke by : William Barillas

Download or read book A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke written by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century. This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

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Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811225798
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (112 download)

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Book Synopsis Memoirs of a Polar Bear by : Yoko Tawada

Download or read book Memoirs of a Polar Bear written by Yoko Tawada and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bears The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as “Yoko Tawada’s magnificent strangeness”—Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.”

The Animal that Therefore I Am

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Author :
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823227901
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis The Animal that Therefore I Am by : Jacques Derrida

Download or read book The Animal that Therefore I Am written by Jacques Derrida and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.