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Author: Aaron Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-04-24
Total Pages: 390
ISBN-13: 0231152973
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of 'animality' as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on par with race and gender.
Author: Mark Payne
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-10-15
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 0226650855
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.
Author: Annabelle Dufourcq
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-30
Total Pages: 245
ISBN-13: 1000414329
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the phenomenon of animal imagination and its profound power over the human imagination. It examines the structural and ethical role that the human imagination must play to provide an interface between humans’ subjectivity and the real cognitive capacities of animals. The book offers a systematic study of the increasing importance of the metaphors, the virtual, and figures in contemporary animal studies. It explores human-animal and real-imaginary dichotomies, revealing them to be the source of oppressive cultural structures. Through an analysis of creative, playful and theatric enactments and mimicry of animal behaviors and communication, the book establishes that human imagination is based on animal imagination. This helps redefine our traditional knowledge about animals and presents new practices and ethical concerns in regard to the animals. The book strongly contends that allowing imagination to play a role in our relation to animals will lead to the development of a more empathetic approach towards them. Drawing on works in phenomenology, contemporary animal philosophy, as well as ethological evidence and biosemiotics, this book is the first to rethink the traditional philosophical concepts of imagination, images, the imaginary, and reality in the light of a zoocentric perspective. It will appeal to philosophers, scholars and students in the field of animal studies, as well as anyone interested in human and non-human imaginations.
Author: Aaron S. Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 389
ISBN-13: 0231152965
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of 'animality' as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on par with race and gender.
Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-02-02
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 0231503776
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs anthropomorphism a scientific sin? Scientists and animal researchers routinely warn against "animal stories," and contrast rigorous explanations and observation to facile and even fanciful projections about animals. Yet many of us, scientists and researchers included, continue to see animals as humans and humans as animals. As this innovative new collection demonstrates, humans use animals to transcend the confines of self and species; they also enlist them to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of humans' experience and fantasy. Humans merge with animals in stories, films, philosophical speculations, and scientific treatises. In their performance with humans on many stages and in different ways, animals move us to think. From Victorian vivisectionists to elephant conservation, from ancient Indian mythology to pet ownership in the contemporary United States, our understanding of both animals and what it means to be human has been shaped by anthropomorphic thinking. The contributors to Thinking with Animals explore the how and why of anthropomorphism, drawing attention to its rich and varied uses. Prominent scholars in the fields of anthropology, ethology, history, and philosophy, as well as filmmakers and photographers, take a closer look at how deeply and broadly ways of imagining animals have transformed humans and animals alike. Essays in the book investigate the changing patterns of anthropomorphism across different time periods and settings, as well as their transformative effects, both figuratively and literally, upon animals, humans, and their interactions. Examining how anthropomorphic thinking "works" in a range of different contexts, contributors reveal the ways in which anthropomorphism turns out to be remarkably useful: it can promote good health and spirits, enlist support in political causes, sell products across boundaries of culture of and nationality, crystallize and strengthen social values, and hold up a philosophical mirror to the human predicament.
Author: Katharine M. Rogers
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2001-03-28
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780472087501
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn intelligent, amusing, and affectionate look at cats in history, literature, and art
Author: Robert W. Mitchell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-06-16
Total Pages: 390
ISBN-13: 9780521283328
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book provides an overview of recent research presenting conflicting interpretations of children's understanding of the psychology of pretense and describes sociocultural factors which influence children's pretenses. Studies of nonhuman primates provide examples of their pretenses and other simulative activities, explore their representational and imaginative capacities and compare their skills with children. Although the psychological requirements for pretending are controversial, evidence presented in this volume suggests that great apes and even monkeys may share capacities for imagination with children and that children's early pretenses may be less psychological than they appear.
Author: Paul A. Trout
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2011-11-15
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 1616145021
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this illuminating and evocative exploration of the origin and function of storytelling, the author goes beyond the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, arguing that mythmaking evolved as a cultural survival strategy for coping with the constant fear of being killed and eaten by predators. Beginning nearly two million years ago in the Pleistocene era, the first stories, Trout argues, functioned as alarm calls, warning fellow group members about the carnivores lurking in the surroundings. At the earliest period, before the development of language, these rudimentary "stories" would have been acted out. When language appeared with the evolution of the ancestral human brain, stories were recited, memorized, and much later written down as the often bone-chilling myths that have survived to this day. This book takes the reader through the landscape of world mythology to show how our more recent ancestors created myths that portrayed animal predators in four basic ways: as monsters, as gods, as benefactors, and as role models. Each incarnation is a variation of the fear-management technique that enabled early humans not only to survive but to overcome their potentially incapacitating fear of predators. In the final chapter, Trout explores the ways in which our visceral fear of predators is played out in the movies, where both animal and human predators serve to probe and revitalize our capacity to detect and survive danger. Anyone with an interest in mythology, archaeology, folk tales, and the origins of contemporary storytelling will find this book an exciting and provocative exploration into the natural and psychological forces that shaped human culture and gave rise to storytelling and mythmaking.
Author: Paul Shepard
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2011-07-01
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 0820342343
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a world increasingly dominated by human beings, the survival of other species becomes more and more questionable. In this brilliant book, Paul Shepard offers a provocative alternative to an "us or them" mentality, proposing that other species are integral to humanity's evolution and exist at the core of our imagination. This trait, he argues, compels us to think of animals in order to be human. Without other living species by which to measure ourselves, Shepard warns, we would be less mature, care less for and be more careless of all life, including our own kind.
Author: Patricia Cox Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-06-15
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 0812295226
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEarly Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art—from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the agility of the mosquito on the wing," to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis—and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts? In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.
