Abstract
This chapter takes current debates on agency and its potential distribution in humans and nonhumans as its starting point for a discussion of the role of literary writing concerned with complex agential entanglements in a variety of forms. It argues that agency is less a question of literary representation than of entangled aesthetic experience and substantiates this claim by analysing the formal features of select exemplary texts, amongst them Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018). The analyses show that literature is an indispensable tool not only for perceiving and experiencing, but also for theorising, agency. The conclusion outlines future perspectives for literary studies as an endeavour partaking in a speculative epistemology of the more-than-human and specifies this claim by pointing out implications for the teaching of literature, understood as an attempt at sensitising readers for the agency of literary forms.
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Bartosch, R. (2021). Forms of Agency, Agency of Forms: Reading and Teaching More-Than-Human Fictions. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_2
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