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Creaturely Poetics

Creaturely Poetics

Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

by Anat Pick
Paperback
Publication Date: 07/04/2011

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Simone Weil once wrote that "the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence," establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body's significance, both human and animal. Exploring the "logic of flesh" and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a "creaturely" approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil's elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.
ISBN:
9780231147873
9780231147873
Category:
Earth sciences
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
07-04-2011
Language:
English
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
Country of origin:
United States
Pages:
264
Dimensions (mm):
210x140x13mm
Weight:
0.31kg

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