Creaturely Poetics - Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-0-231-14786-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 218 mm, Gewicht: 388 g

Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence," establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body's significance, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh" and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil's elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pick, Anat

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Creaturely BodiesPart 1 The Inhumanity of Literature 1. Humanity Unraveled, Humanity Regained: The Holocaust and the Discourse of Species2. Neanderthal Poetics in William Golding's The Inheritors3. The Indignities of Species in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig TalesPart 2 The Inhumanity of Film 4. Cine-Zoos5. Scientific Surrealism in the Films of Georges Franju and Frederick Wiseman6. Werner Herzog's Creaturely PoeticsConclusion: Animal SaintlinessNotesWorks CitedIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Pick, Anat
Anat Pick is senior lecturer in film and program leader for film and video: theory and practice at the University of East London. She has published on Henry James and Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, posthumanist theory, and independent film.