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Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference-rather than a porous transition-between 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 human-animal 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 the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
List 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
Tomaz Grusovnik
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
About the author
Nandita Batra is currently Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez. She is the editor of Of Mice and Men: Animals and Human Culture and This Watery World: Humans and the Sea.Mario Wenning is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macau. He is the editor of Comparative Perspectives on the Philosophy of Nature and Contemporary Perspectives on Critical Theory and Systems Theory.Christopher Simon is professor of political science at the University of Utah.Sukanya Behura Senapati is professor of English at the University of South Florida.
