Beyond the Human-Animal Divide

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 "e;Creature Comforts"e; 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.

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’sWorstward Ho and Michel Foucault'sThe 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.  

.- 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.- Storying Creaturely Life.-  The Collaborative Craft of Creaturely Writing.- Animals as Signifiers: Re-Reading Michel Foucault’sThe Order of Things as a Genealogical Working Tool for the Historical Human-Animal Studies.-  Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalization.- Creaturely Apotheosis: Posthumanist Vulnerability in Hans Henny Jahnn’sPerrudja.- ‘the impulse towards silence’: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee.- Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor.