Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature: (Dis)Figurations of Humanimality from Shakespeare to Desai

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature: (Dis)Figurations of Humanimality from Shakespeare to Desai

Benston, Kimberly W.

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date June 8, 2027

ISBN10: 1785279602
ISBN13: 9781785279607
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: Jun 8 2027
Pages: 250
Language: English

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human being to its limits. This project arises within the question, Can an animal die?, formulated in response to Martin Heidegger's famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot die but can only perish, an assertion that sharply summarizes western humanist philosophical discourse - particularly as etched in the modern turn initiated by Descartes - in which the human emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently - most notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas - philosophers have interrogated the grounds of Heidegger's formulation, putting into question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly on ethological revelations of animal capacities, and partly on ideas intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis.

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