Overview
- Recontextualizes prominent texts in intellectual and philosophical history in terms of animal studies
- Sets forth a methodology for reading literature as an “animalist”
- Contributes to understanding of embodiment, affect, and perception
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.
Reviews
“Animalist perception: it's a radically new topic, carved out of existing theoretical literature. Donald Wesling has chosen to write on difficult philosophers, and he gives to them clever and understandable readings. He brings together a tradition out of scattered writings. He synthesizes an array of perspectives. Last not least, his titles and subtitles are always witty.” (Enikö Bollobás, Professor of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)“The most challenging companion animals are microbes (by billions inside us) and (symbolically) the truly wild animals: tapeworms, wolverines, head lice, krill, rattlesnakes. The idea that the megafauna are our animal companions, when the biomass is practically entirely bacteria, seems spent. What I want to read is a radical animal argument bound to perception and feeling—Donald Wesling's project. Is 'animal' better than Wesling's 'animalist' as either/both adjective/noun? It felt good to use two sentences back. What would Derrida say? For then the human being wouldn't have to be a human being, if it ever could, although it is an animal.” (John Granger, Lecturer in Literature, University of California, San Diego, USA)
“The book puts perception at the heart of thinking the trio: animality, reading, writing. It extends animal studies by focusing on the phenomenology of perception as event and process in literary and philosophical texts. It discovers and develops a notion of 'animalist' thinking and gives examples and demonstrations of how one might read in that tradition. It insists on and clarifies links between motion, sense, feeling, thought and writing.... It's [also] nicely-written, zingy but serious.... This will be of interest for years to come as a substantial work of thinking.” (Sarah Wood, author of Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (2014))
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Donald Wesling is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at UC San Diego, USA. He has published on Wordsworth, John Muir, Edward Dorn, and Bakhtin; on rhyme, meter, and avant-garde prosody; and on how voice and emotion get into writing.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Animal Perception and Literary Language
Authors: Donald Wesling
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-04968-3Published: 14 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-04969-0Published: 26 December 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6338
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6346
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIV, 327
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Literary Theory, Ethics, Cognitive Psychology