Life After Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó, Tamás Lénárt, Attila Simon, Roland Végső

   Pages 1-13

3. Institutions of Life

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

      PDF

   2. Bio-poetics and the Dynamic Multiplicity of Bios: How Literature Challenges the Politics, Economics and Sciences of Life

      • Vittoria Borsò

      Pages 17-32

   3. Institution and Life as an Institution: Uterus: Mother’s Body, Father’s Right (Life and Norm)

      • Petar Bojanić

      Pages 33-38

   4. Towards a Poetics of Worldlessness: Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Human Action

      • Roland Végső

      Pages 39-51

4. Anthropology, Performativity, and Language

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 53-53

      PDF

   2. Man and Other Political Animals in Aristotle

      • Attila Simon

      Pages 55-65

   3. Is There an Essential Convergence Between Signification and Animals? On the Truth and Lying of Animal Names in a Nietzschean Sense

      • Hajnalka Halász

      Pages 67-78

   4. Noble Promises: Performativity and Physiology in Nietzsche

      • Csongor Lőrincz

      Pages 79-107

   5. Austin’s Animals

      • Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó

      Pages 109-116

   6. Self-interpreting Language Animal: Charles Taylor’s Anthropology

      • Csaba Olay

      Pages 117-135

5. Anthrozoology, Ethics, and Bio-Aesthetics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

      PDF

   2. The Theriomorphic Face

      • Georg Witte

      Pages 139-162

   3. ‘Step by Step into Ever Greater Decadence’: Discourses of Life and Metamorphic Anthropology

      • Márió Z. Nemes

      Pages 163-177

   4. Bio-Aesthetics: The Production of Life in Contemporary Art

      • Jessica Ullrich

      Pages 179-199

6. Biopoetics, Zoopoetics, Biophilology

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 201-201

      PDF

   2. Io’s Writing: Human and Animal in the Prison-House of Fiction

      • Ábel Tamás

      Pages 203-213

   3. ‘Lizard on a Sunlit Stone’: Lőrinc Szabó and the Biopoetical Beginnings of Modern Poetry

      • Ernő Kulcsár Szabó

      Pages 215-228

   4. Of Mice and Men: Dissolution and Reconstruction of ‘Nature’s Larger Scheme’: Burns, Mészöly, Kertész

      • Tamás Lénárt

      Pages 229-239

This book offers innovative investigations of the concept of life in art and in theory. It features essays that explore biopoetics and look at how insights from the natural sciences shape research within the humanities. Since literature, works of art, and other cultural products decisively shape our ideas of what it means to be human, the contributors to this volume examine the question of what literature, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophy contribute to the distinctions (or non-distinctions) between human, animal, and vegetal existence.

Coverage combines different methodological aspects and addresses a wide field of comparative literary studies. The essays consider the question of language (as a distinctive feature of human existence) in a number of different contexts, which range from Aristotle’s works, through several historical layers of the philosophical discourse on the origins of speech, to modern anthropology, and 20th century continental philosophy. In addition, the volume includes concrete case studies to the current post-humanism debate and provides literary, art historian, and philosophical perspectives on animal studies.

The historical multiplicity of the various cultural representations of biological existence (be that human, animal, vegetal, or mixed) might serve as a productive foundation for discussing the nature and forms of literature’s critical contributions to our understanding of these fundamental categories. This volume opens up this subject to students and scholars of literature, art, philosophy, ethics, and cultural studies, and to anyone with a theoretical interest in the questions of life.

• Animal Studies
• Animals and History of Arts
• Biopoetics
• Biopolitics
• Life and Literature
• Language and Anthropological Difference
• Biophilology
• Vegetal Existence
• Philosophical Perspectives on Animal Studies
• Post-humanism Debate
• Political Animals in Aristotle
• Poetics of Worldlessness
• Animal Voices in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
• Representations of Biological Existence
• Institution and Life

• Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

  Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó, Tamás Lénárt, Attila Simon

• Department of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA

  Roland Végső

Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Main fields of research: lyric theory, deconstructive criticism, political theory, performativity, Hungarian and German literature of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. He has published monographs in Hungarian and co-edited several volumes, among them Transfer and Translation (Budapest 2002) and Signaturen des Geschehens (Bielefeld 2014). His book A gondolkodás háborúi (Budapest: Ráció, 2014) deals with the discourse of violence and power in political philosophy and literature in the first half of the 20^th century. His most recent publication Szinonímiák (Budapest: Ráció, 2016) addresses Martin Heidegger’s late work, concentrating on issues of materiality, technicity, aesthetics and translation.

Tamás Lénárt attended Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Humanities. He has a master’s degree in Hungarian and German Studies. He earned his doctorate (Ph.D.) degree with his thesis on photography and literature at the General Literary Studies and Cultural Studies Literary Program in 2012. He is assistant professor at the Institute of Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies, ELTE.  His main research areas are post-war Hungarian literature, media theory, and visual studies in literature.

Attila Simon earned his Ph.D. with a thesis on Aristotle’s aesthetics. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he teaches literary and critical theory and ancient literature. His primary research interests are ancient Greek drama and theatre, as well as ancient and contemporary literary theory with a focus on questions of culture and media. He is the author of 2 books in Hungarian and translator of Plato’s Phaedrus and Cicero’s The Laws. In addition, he published several articles in refereed journals and edited volumes as well as translations of philosophical essays (from English and German into Hungarian). He is currently working on a book on Aristotle’s practical philosophy as a kind of existential hermeneutics.

Roland Végső is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he teaches literary and critical theory and twentieth-century literatures. His primary research interests are contemporary continental philosophy, modernism, and translation theory. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham UP, 2013). In addition, he is also the translator of numerous philosophical essays as well as two books: Rodolphe Gasché’s Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology (Stanford UP, 2012) and Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham UP, 2016). He is the co-editor of the book series Provocations published by University of Nebraska Press. He is currently completing a book manuscript devoted the problem of “worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit) in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy

Policies and ethics