Description
Book SynopsisThroughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential differencerather than a porous transitionbetween the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans..
This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions What is human? and What is animal? What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the humananimal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct th
Trade Review
Bantra and Wenning edited and selected this excellent, diverse collection of scholarly essays that reevaluate or break human-nonhuman boundaries. The latest volume in Lexington's 'Ecocritical Theory and Practice' series, the book provides a welcome complement to the resulting discourse at two international conferences by the same name, held at the editors' home universities in Puerto Rico and Macau. The innovative essays demonstrate that boundaries have two sides. Humans and animals are different, mostly in self-appointed ways, but also markedly similar in terms of culture and innovation. For example, essays on Aesop’s fables and the Ramayana epic argue that humans are not only similar to some other animals but are, in certain cases, even beholden to them. Narratives of difference, such as Cartesian subjectivism and Heideggerian phenomenology, are juxtaposed with counter narratives from ancient texts and modern biology to an enlightening effect. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *
From Aesop’s and Heidegger’s animals to McKibben’s and Bekoff’s anthropocene, the dividing line between homo sapiens and the world’s other species has been supported and abolished, attacked and embraced. As ecocriticism has developed into a discipline, scholars have seen this same human/animal distinction as central to our understanding of ecology and the rise of environmentalism. Batra and Wenning bring together essays that make clear why this debate is so central to our understanding of the role of animals in human life and the role of humans in the lives of animals. -- Ashton Nichols, Beach ’65 Distinguished Professor in Sustainability Studies and Professor of English, Dickinson College, and author of Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Urbanatural Roosting and Romantic Natural Histories: Wordsworth, Darwin and Others
Table of Contents
Introduction
Nandita Batra and Mario Wenning
I. Contesting Exceptionalism
1. Bridging the Abyss: Re-interpreting Heidegger’s Animals as a Basis for inter-species Understanding
Joshua A. Bergamin
2. Ramayana’s Hanuman—Animal, Human or Divine
Sukanya B. Senapati
3. Aesop: Figuring the Human/Animal Boundary
John Hartigan
II. Representing the Human-Animal Boundary
4. ‘Zones of Non-Knowledge’: Facing The Open with R. M. Rilke, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio Agamben
Sabine Lenore Müller
5. The Avoidance of Moral Responsibility towards Animals: Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the Human Animal Boundary
Tomaž Grušovnik
6. The Cattle in the Long Cedar Springs Draw
Gary Comstock
7. Re-writing the Human-Animal Divide: Humanism and Octavia Butler’s “Amborg”
Aparajita Nanda
8. Milton’s Elephant
James P. Conlan
III. Re-Situating the Human/Animal Boundary
9. The Moral Duties of Dolphins
Sara Gavrell Ortiz
10. Great Apes and Lesser Humans: Goodall and the Geographic Entangled in Uhuru
Kristian Bjørkdahl
11. The Empress and the Beast: Finding a Philosophical Voice in Fiction
Alison Suen
12. A Bestiary for the Anthropocene: The End of Nature and the Future of Animal Life on Planet Earth
Eduardo Mendieta
