Beyond the Human-Animal Divide

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Animating Creaturely Life: Ontology and Ethics Beyond Anthropocentrism

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Animating Creaturely Life

      • Dominik Ohrem

      Pages 3-19

   3. Earth Ethics and Creaturely Cohabitation

      • Kelly Oliver

      Pages 21-41

   4. An Address from Elsewhere: Vulnerability, Relationality, and Conceptions of Creaturely Embodiment

      • Dominik Ohrem

      Pages 43-75

   5. “Creature Comforts”: Crafting a Common Language Across the Species Divide

      • Randy Malamud

      Pages 77-94

   6. Cuts: The Rhythms of “Healing-with” Companion Animals

      • Elizabeth Pattinson

      Pages 95-112

   7. A Dog’s Death: Art as a Work of Mourning

      • Jessica Ullrich

      Pages 113-139

   8. Playing like a Loser

      • Tom Tyler

      Pages 141-149

3. Storying Creaturely Life: Writing/Reading Animality and Human–Animal Relations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 151-151

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   2. Storying Creaturely Life

      • Roman Bartosch

      Pages 153-165

   3. The Collaborative Craft of Creaturely Writing

      • Alex Lockwood

      Pages 167-187

   4. Animals as Signifiers: Re-Reading Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things as a Genealogical Working Tool for Historical Human–Animal Studies

      • Mieke Roscher

      Pages 189-214

   5. Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalization

      • Roman Bartosch

      Pages 215-238

   6. Creaturely Apotheosis: Posthumanist Vulnerability in Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja

      • Peter J. Meedom

      Pages 239-263

   7. “The Impulse Towards Silence”: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee

      • Joseph Anderton

      Pages 265-282

   8. Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor

      • Kári Driscoll

      Pages 283-305

4. Afterword

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 307-307

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   2. Thinking about Talking about Writing about … “Animals”

      • Jane Desmond

      Pages 309-315

5. Back Matter

   Pages 317-325

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This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world. The text explores written work such as Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, video media such as the film "Creature Comforts" and the video game Into the Dead, and photography. With chapters written by an international group of philosophers, literary and cultural studies scholars, historians and others, the volume brings together established experts and forward-thinking early career scholars to provide an interdisciplinary engagement with ways of thinking and writing the creaturely to establish a postanthropocentric sense of human-animal relationality.  

• animals ins Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho
• Animals in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K
• animals and metaphorization
• materialism versus semiotics
• Zoopoetics
• Luigi Pirandello’s Si gira!
• Nick Park’s “Creature Comforts”
• interspecies communication
• Perrudja by Hans Henny Jahnn
• “apotheosis of the creature.”
• creatural lives in the interwar period
• human-animal relationships in the anthropocene
• postanthropocentrism
• earth-based ethics
• Heidegger’s poiesis
• Derrida’s poetic as if
• biosociality
• Michel Foucault and animals
• video games and prey perspective
• dogs and human identity

• School of History, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

  Dominik Ohrem

• Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

  Roman Bartosch

Dominik Ohrem is Lecturer in the  Anglo-American Department of the School of History at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Roman Bartosch is  Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Policies and ethics