Download or read book Human Minds and Animal Stories written by Wojciech Malecki and published by Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment. This book was released on 2019 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom's Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It's So Hard To Think Straight About Animals f how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom's Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It's So Hard To Think Straight About Animals

Download or read book Animal Narratives and Culture written by Anna Barcz and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “vulnerable realism” can imply two different understandings: one presenting weak realism as incomplete, and mixed with other literary styles; the other bringing realistic vulnerable experience into narration. The second is the key concern of this work, though it does not exclude the first, as it asks questions about realism as such, entering into a polemic with the tradition of literary realism. Realism, then, is not primarily understood as a narrative style, but as a narration that tests the probability of nonhuman vulnerable experience and makes it real. The book consists of three parts. The first presents examples of how realism has been redefined in trauma studies and how it may refer to animal experience. The second explores what is added to the narrative by literature, including the animal perspective (the zoonarrative) and how it is conducted (zoocriticism). The third analyses cultural texts, such as painting, circuses, and memorials, which realistically generate animal vulnerability and provide non-anthropocentric frameworks, anchoring our knowledge in the experience of fragile historical reality.

Download or read book Animals and Their People written by Anna Barcz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals and Their People: Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies, edited by Anna Barcz and Dorota Łagodzka, provides a zoocentric insight into philosophical, artistic, and literary problems in Western, Anglo-American, and Central-Eastern European context. The contributors go beyond treating humans as the sole object of research and comprehension, and focus primarily on non-human animals. This book results from intellectual exchange between Polish and foreign researchers and highlights cultural perspective as an exciting language of animal representation. Animals and Their People aims to bridge the gap between Anglo-American and Central European human-animal studies.

Download or read book Of Mice and Men written by Nandita Batra and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Mice and Men: Animals in Human Culture is a book-length collection of essays that examines human views of non-human animals. The essays are written by scholars from Australia, East Asia, Europe and the Americas, who represent a wide range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Addressing topics such as animal rights, ecology, anthropocentrism, feminism, animal domestication, dietary restrictions, and cultural imperialism, the book considers local and global issues as well as ancient and contemporary discourses, and it will appeal to readers with both general and specialized interests in the role played by animals in human cultures.

Download or read book Animals as Experiencing Entities written by Michael J. Glover and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Storytelling Animal written by Jonathan Gottschall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative scholar delivers the first book on the new science of storytelling: the latest thinking on why we tell stories and what stories reveal about human nature.

Download or read book Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture written by Anna Feuerstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book is the first collection to critically address the manifold alignments and frequent co-constitutions of children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies. The cultural politics of power shaping relationships between children, pets, and adults inform the wide range of essays included in this collection, as they explore issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. The volume use the frequent social and cultural intersections between children and pets as an opportunity to analyze institutions that create pet and child subjectivity, from education and training to putting children and pets on display for entertainment purposes. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. Examining childhood and pethood in America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, this collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures. By presenting innovative approaches to the child and the pet, the book brings to light alternative paths toward understanding these figures, leading to new openings and questions about kinship, agency, and the power of care that so often shapes our relationships with children and animals. This will be an important volume for scholars of animal studies, childhood studies, children’s literature, cultural studies, political theory, education, art history, and sociology.

Download or read book Livestock and Literature written by Liza B. Bauer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals’ commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine ‘what if’ scenarios where "livestock" practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers' understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page. Liza B. Bauer is Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking and co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research section on Human-Animal Studies at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.

Download or read book Creatural Fictions written by David Herman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

Download or read book The Evolution of Culture in Animals written by John Tyler Bonner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic locations, and inventions or innovations. Defining culture as the transmission of information by behavioral rather than genetical means, he demonstrates the continuum between the traits we find in animals and those we often consider uniquely human.

Download or read book Perceiving Animals written by Erica Fudge and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The boundaries between human and beast forged a rugged philosophical landscape across early modern England. Spectators gathered in London's Bear Garden to watch the callous and brutal baiting of animals. A wave of "new" scientists performed vivisections on live animals to learn more about the human body. In Perceiving Animals, the British scholar Erica Fudge traces the dangers and problems of anthropocentrism in texts written from 1558 to 1649. Meticulous examinations of scientific, legal, political, literary, and religious writings offer unique and fascinating depictions of human perceptions about the natural world. Views carried over from bestiaries--medieval treatises on animals-- posited animals as nonsentient beings whose merits were measured solely by what provisions they afforded humans: food, medicine, clothing, travel, labor, scientific knowledge. Without consciences or faith, animals were deemed far inferior to humans. While writings from the period asserted an enormous biological superiority, Fudge contends actual human behavior and logic worked, sometimes accidentally, to close the alleged gap. In the Bear Garden, even a man of the lowest social rank had power over a tortured animal, sinking him, though, below the beasts. The beast fable itself fails to show a true understanding of animals, as it merely attributes human characteristics to beasts in an attempt to teach humanist ideals. Scholars and writers continually turned to the animal world for reflection. Despite this, scientists of the period used animals for empirical and medical knowledge, recognizing biological and spiritual similarities but refusing to renege human superiority. Including an insightful reexamination of Ben Jonson's Volpone and fascinating looks at works by Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Richard Overton, among others, Fudge probes issues of animal ownership and biological and spiritual superiority in early modern England that resonate with philosophical quandaries still relevant in contemporary society.

Download or read book Animal Stories written by Susan McHugh and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How cross-species companionship is figured across a variety of media--and why it matters.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Animals written by Linda Kalof and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compete history from antiquity to today of the history of animals and of their relationship with humans.

Download or read book Beyond the Human Animal Divide written by Dominik Ohrem and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Animal Writing written by Sands Danielle Sands and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects - beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy. Along the way she encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois.

Download or read book Unraveling The Wild written by Damien Contessa and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lastly, in the third chapter, I draw on ethnographic field notes to show how animals are understood and talked about by visitors in a Manatee Viewing Center in central Florida. I examine how animals challenge social expectations in everyday life situations, and how these breaches lead to situational storytelling and coordinated social activity. I suggest that animals can become messengers of a sacred nature, which is celebrated in the social performance of wildlife viewing. In conclusion, I follow Levi-Strauss (1966) to argue that animals are "good to think with" because they provide people with an "animal mirror" to look at themselves (Haraway 2008). Furthermore, I indicate that hidden meanings in animal stories inform how people think, feel, and act towards animals in different social contexts, and are thereby reinforced through cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal practices. Animal stories have power because they are often translated into modes of activity and used to realize people's hopes and fears. In other words, animal stories are alternative forms of wildlife management that act to segregate animals from particular social activities, and designate them to appropriate places in society. Findings from this dissertation are not limited to animals, and may be applied to various cultural logics and socially defined boundaries.

Download or read book Wild Animal Story written by Ralph Lutts and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wild animal story emerged in Canadian literature as a distinct genre, in which animals pursue their own interests—survival for themselves, their offspring, and perhaps a mate, or the pure pleasure of their wildness. Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early stories—by Charles G. D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London and others—had an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunter—Theodore Roosevelt—discredited these writers as "nature fakers," accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior. The stories and commentaries collected here span the twentieth century. As present day animal behaviorists, psychologists, and the public attempt to sort out the meaning of what animals do and our obligations to them, Ralph Lutts maps some of the prominent features of our cultural landscape. Tales include: • The Springfield Fox by Ernest Thompson Seton • The Sounding of the Call by Jack London • Stickeen by John Muir • Journey to the Sea by Rachel Carson Other selections include esssays by Theoore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph H. Lutts. postamble();