Download or read book Mimesis and the Human Animal written by Robert Storey and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996-12-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mimesis and the Human Animal, Robert Storey argues that human culture derives from human biology and that literary representation therefore must have a biological basis. As he ponders the question "What does it mean to say that art imitates life?" he must consider both "What is life?" and "What is art?" A unique approach to the subject of mimesis, Storey's book goes beyond the politicizing of literature grounded in literary theory to develop a scientific basis for the creation of literature and art.
Download or read book Bestiarium written by Mariaelisa Dimino and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2018-10-25T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human-animal relationship has always been characterized by a wide net of interactions and exchanges. By providing an overview of the concept of animality – and of the several meanings attached to it – this book aims at rethinking the real nature of this notion, towards a new definition of both the human and the animal. The authors highlight the need to overcome the traditional tendency to read the animal merely as a symbol, a metaphor or an allegory, whose only purpose is that of representing and negotiating human power relations of race, class, and gender. Within this context, the edited collection Bestiarium intends to contribute to the present debate on Animal Studies, by focusing on literary texts and discursive practices, which reveal the epistemological and cultural dynamics that structure the very representation of the animal.
Download or read book How We Became Human written by Pierpaolo Antonello and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, René Girard’s mimetic theory is presented as elucidating “the origins of culture.” He posits that archaic religion (or “the sacred”), particularly in its dynamics of sacrifice and ritual, is a neglected and major key to unlocking the enigma of “how we became human.” French philosopher of science Michel Serres states that Girard’s theory provides a Darwinian theory of culture because it “proposes a dynamic, shows an evolution and gives a universal explanation.” This major claim has, however, remained underscrutinized by scholars working on Girard’s theory, and it is mostly overlooked within the natural and social sciences. Joining disciplinary worlds, this book aims to explore this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy. The contributors provide major evidence in favor of Girard’s hypothesis. Equally, Girard’s theory is presented as having the potential to become for the human and social sciences something akin to the integrating framework that present-day biological science owes to Darwin—something compatible with it and complementary to it in accounting for the still remarkably little understood phenomenon of human emergence.
Download or read book Over the Human written by Roberto Marchesini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-26 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new way to understand human–animal interactions. Offering a profound discussion of topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author channels the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The research presents a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. It challenges the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. Readers discover a vision of the human as a species informed by an intertwining with animals. The human being is not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid. The argument it presents interests scholars, thinkers, and researchers. It also appeals to anyone who wants to delve into the deep animal–human bond and its philosophical, cultural, political instances. The author is a veterinarian, ethologist, and philosopher. He uses cognitive science, zooanthropology, and philosophy to engage in a series of empirical, theoretical, and practice-based engagements with animal life. In the process, he argues that animals are key to human identity and culture at all levels.
Download or read book Beyond anthropocentrism written by Roberto Marchesini and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2019-01-18T00:00:00+01:00 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roberto Marchesini presents a timely proposal within post-human philosophy in order to overcome the centuries-long separation between human beings, non-human animals and technology. This book highlights the inspiring nature of the relationship with non-human beings – what Marchesini calls “Epiphany” – and how its enhancement can open new existential dimensions. Technology is also reinterpreted, no longer as a performative tool, but as a virus that infiltrates the human dimension and changes its predicates. Technopoietic events are not just the product of human intelligence, but they arise from an epiphany (a becoming alterity), thus positioning technology well within the ontological and somatic dimension of human beings. This book lays the foundations for a new and non-anthropocentric Humanism, which is able to recognize the essential role that non-human alterities have had throughout our history.
Download or read book Human Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity.
Download or read book Between the Species written by Arnold Arluke and published by Allyn & Bacon. This book was released on 2009 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology, from the literature of sociology and other disciplines as well, examines the various roles that animals play in human societies. It covers a full spectrum of human-animal interaction: pets and companions; animals as sources of food, clothing and labor; animals in captivity; humans and wildlife; animals as research subjects; and animals as objects of recreation and sport. "Between the Species" represents many of the leading experts in this field, including the authors, who co-edit a scholarly series on animals, society, and culture.
Download or read book The Human Animal written by Weston La Barre and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mimesis and Science written by Scott R. Garrels and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of René Girard’s mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in human life, revealing the unique theoretical links that can now be made from the neural basis of social interaction to the structure and evolution of human culture and religion. Together, mimetic scholars and imitation researchers are on the cutting edge of some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the distinctive human capacity for both incredible acts of empathy and compassion as well as mass antipathy and violence. As a result, this interdisciplinary volume promises to help shed light on some of the most pressing and complex questions of our contemporary world.
Download or read book The Moral Animal written by Robert Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-03 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most provocative science books ever published—"a feast of great thinking and writing about the most profound issues there are" (The New York Times Book Review). "Fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and engrossingly original." —The New York Times Book Review Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animaled one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics—as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies. Illustrations.
Download or read book Animal Capital written by Nicole Shukin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The juxtaposition of biopolitical critique and animal studies--two subjects seldom theorized together--signals the double-edged intervention of Animal Capital. Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the "question of the animal," challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one another in market cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science written by Martin Kemp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children’s stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images—as well as scientific theories—throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we’d like to pretend. Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa. Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.
Download or read book Human Animal Relationships in San and Hunter Gatherer Cosmology Volume II written by Mathias Guenther and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. Building from the examinations of San myth and contemporary culture in Volume I, Volume II considers the experiential implications of a cosmology in which ontological mutability—ambiguity and inconstancy—hold sway. As he considers how people experience ontological mutability and deal with profound identity issues mentally and affectively, Guenther explores three primary areas: general receptiveness to ontological ambiguity; the impact of the experience of transformation (both virtual/vicarious and actual/direct); and the intersection of the mythic, spirit world with reality. Through a comparative consideration of animistic cosmology amongst the San, Bantu-speakers and the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic, alongside a discussion of animistic currents in Western humanities and ethology, Guenther clearly paints the relative strengths and weaknesses of New Animism discourse, particularly in relation to San ontology and cosmology, but with overarching relevance.
Download or read book Human and Animal in Ancient Greece written by Tua Korhonen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals were omnipresent in the everyday life and the visual arts of classical Greece. In literature, too, they had significant functions.This book discusses the role of animals - both domestic and wild - and mythological hybrid creatures in ancient Greek literature. Challenging the traditional view of the Greek anthropocentrism, the authors provide a nuanced interpretation of the classical relationship to animals. Through a close textual analysis, they highlight the emergence of the perspective of animals in Greek literature. Central to the book's enquiry is the question of empathy: investigating the ways in which ancient Greek authors invited their readers to empathise with non-human counterparts. The book presents case studies on the animal similes in the Iliad, the addresses to animals and nature in Sophocles' Philoctetes, the human-bird hybrids in The Birds by Aristophanes and the animal protagonists of Anyte's epigrams. Throughout, the authors develop an innovative methodology that combines philological and historical analysis with a philosophy of embodiment, or phenomenology of the body. Shedding new light on how animals were regarded in ancient Greek society, the book will be of interest to classicists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and all those studying empathy and the human-animal relationship.
Download or read book Human Animal Relationships in San and Hunter Gatherer Cosmology Volume I written by Mathias Guenther and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. In Volume I, therianthropes and transformations, two manifestations of ontological mutability that are conceptually and phenomenologically linked, are contextualized in broader San myth. Guenther explores the pervasiveness of human-animal hybridity and transformation in San expressive culture (myth, stories and storytelling, ludic dancing and art, ancestral rock art and contemporary easel art), ritual (trance dance curing, female and male rites of passage) and hunting. Transformation is shown to be experienced by humans, particularly via rituals and dancing that evoke animal identity mergers, but also by hunters who may engage with their prey animals in terms of sympathy and inter-subjectivity, particularly through the use of “hunting medicines.”
Download or read book Only For Them written by Leonardo Caffo and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2014-10-14T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Year after year, day after day,minute after minute, billions ofnon-human animals are slaughteredfor several purposes andaims (food, clothing, entertainment,research). An analogoussituation whose objects were humansinstead of animals wouldobviously never be accepted. Butwhy do we tolerate and even justifyone practice while deploringthe other? The answer is far frombanal: this book is an attempt atfinding it beyond the everyday life,through politics and philosophy.
Download or read book The Human Animal written by Eric Todd Olson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olson presents a defence of a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. Continuity of mental contents or capacities is neither necessary nor sufficient for us to persist through time. Our identity consists in biological processes.
