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Animal Poetics and Literary Thinking explores and reorients our approach to animal thinking through the intersection between literary fiction, continental philosophy, and theory. This book situates animals and animality as neither a corporeal entity nor a conceptual essence, but as a scintillating "impossibility" that concurrently encourages and overturns our grasping impulse to know animals from their perspectives. This framework corresponds with the milieu of literature as poesis, which is uniquely connected to a refusal to know. By exploring the writings of J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, Mary Shelly, and Kazuo Ishiguro, this volume encounters a template of animal thinking that seeks to uncover the singularity of animals through a sustained exploration of what remains radically unknowable about animality, the vestiges of which have their presence in the world of literary fiction.
List of contents
Foreword Richard Kerridge
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Animal Poetics
Chapter 1: Animal Poetics and Coetzeean Ethics
Chapter 2: Animal poetics and Kafakan Stupidity
Chapter 3: Animal Poetics and Frankensteinic Monstrosity
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
About the author
Ratul Nandi is assistant professor of English in Siliguri College, India.Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic who leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research and postgraduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. His works include: Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians (2014), J. H. Prynne’s place-based poem-sequence The Oval Window, in collaboration with the late N. H. Reeve (2018), Writing the Enviornment (1998) and his other nature writing has been broadcast and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. He was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI and has been an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council. With Greg Garrard he is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series ‘Environmental Cultures’ – the first series of monographs in the Environmental Humanities to be published in Britain and he is a member of the steering committee of New Networks for Nature.
