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Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment.
Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Nude Vibrations: Isadora Duncan's Creatural Aesthetic
- Chapter Two: Creative Incantations and Involutions in D. H. Lawrence
- Chapter Three: Woolf's Floating Monkeys and Whirling Women
- Chapter Four: Strange Prosthetics: Rachel Rosenthal's Rats and Rings
- Chapter Five: UnCaging Cunningham's Animals
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Carrie Rohman is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College and the author of Stalking the Subject (2008).
Summary
Choreographies of the Living explores the shift from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman's bioaesthetic framework describes how art-making binds us to other animals in literature, visual art, dance, and performance.
Additional text
Given its clear, accessible style and its focus on engagements with animality in 20th- and 21st- century literature, art, and performance, Choreographies of the Living promises to have broad appeal for specialists and students across the arts and humanities...This watershed study will be relevant not only for readers based in animal studies and modernist, postmodernist, and/or contemporary literature, but also for readers interested in dance, theater and performance studies, cultural studies, history, and philosophy.
