Exploring Animal Encounters

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

1. Some Thoughts on (Animal) Encounter, Dominik Ohrem.- 2. The Three Ethologies, Matthew Calarco.- 3. Hanging Together in a Touch: Friendship and Mourning in the Melancholic Limits of Man, James R. Goebel.- 4. Such Beastly Behavior! Predation, Revenge, and the Question of Ethics, Sarah E. McFarland.- 5. Precarious Encounters, Nicole Shukin.- 6. The Photographer and the Zoo: A Memoir of Mediated Encounters, Randy Malamud.- 7. Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox: Dr. Jenner and the “Modern Chimera”, Rob Boddice.- 8. Dissolving into Visibility: Early American Natural History and the Corporeality of Interspecies Encounters, Julie McCown.- 9. Deep History, Interspecies Coevolution, and the Eco-Imaginary, Louise Westling.- 10. Of Primates’ Bodies: Forms of Human-Other Primate Intercorporeality, Amanda D. Cortez and Agustín Fuentes.- 11. Incorrect and Beautiful Anatomies: Becomings, Immanence, and Transspecies Bodies in the Art of Roberto Fabelo, Christina Garcia.