Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

by David P. Rando, Richard Kerridge (Editor), Greg Garrard (Editor)

Overview

Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.

Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350356160
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/28/2024
Series:	Environmental Cultures
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

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.

Greg Garrard is Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the bestselling book Ecocriticism (2nd edition, 2011) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Android as Device
Chapter 1. Nonhuman Hope
Chapter 2. The Artificial Gaze
Chapter 3. Familiar Aliens
Chapter 4. Posthumous Humanity
Conclusion: Uniqueness, or, Doing Animal Studies One Alien at a Time
Coda: To the Wild Robots of the Future
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recommended.” —Anthony Lioi, Professor of Liberal Arts and English, The Julliard School, USA

“Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that aren't animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understandings of the human.” —John Miller, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Sheffield, UK

“Rando contributes greatly to the fields of Animal Studies … [this] is a key text for any scholar to venture beyond the fringes of Animal Studies to explore its many possibilities.” —Ecozon@

From the Publisher