The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination - Softcover

Payne, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022627232X ISBN 13: 9780226272320

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them.

The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Payne is professor in the Department of Classics and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022627232X
• ISBN 13: 9780226272320
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174