Skip to product information
1 of 1

Creaturely Poetics

Regular price $32.00
Regular price $32.00 Sale price $32.00
Sold out
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 existenc...
Read More
  • 07 April 2011
View Product Details
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.
files/i.png Icon
Price: $32.00
Pages: 264
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 07 April 2011
Trim Size: 8.25 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9780231147873
Format: Paperback
BISACs: NATURE / Animal Rights, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / General
REVIEWS Icon
Animals and the Human Imagination soars. Intellectually exciting, smart, and accessible, this volume will intrigue and revolt, surprise and inspire. The opening overview by Gross is a tour de force and each essay fascinates. Collectively they offer an invitation to think in new ways about what we, perhaps wrongly, call our humanity. I can't imagine a better introduction to the essential new field of critical animal studies.
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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Creaturely Bodies
Part 1 The Inhumanity of Literature
1. Humanity Unraveled, Humanity Regained: The Holocaust and the Discourse of Species
2. Neanderthal Poetics in William Golding's The Inheritors
3. The Indignities of Species in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales
Part 2 The Inhumanity of Film
4. Cine-Zoos
5. Scientific Surrealism in the Films of Georges Franju and Frederick Wiseman
6. Werner Herzog's Creaturely Poetics
Conclusion: Animal Saintliness
Notes
Works Cited
Index