Abstract
The chapter analyses creaturely relationality in literary fiction. Literary fiction, it is argued, can be understood as a privileged site for spelling out the experience of the creaturely. In this chapter, however, the analytical focus is not one full texts but on particular scenes and the briefest of humanimal encounters that nevertheless have a fundamental narrative impact. Thus‚ the aim of the chapter is to look at (literary) form in the creation of affect and what is described as short moments of ‘epiphany’ or aesthetic calling in which human and animal meet and exchange gazes as points of entry for creaturely interpretive and affective responses.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. 2000 [1980]. Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage.
Bartosch, Roman. 2013. EnvironMentality. Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
———. 2016. “‘A Poet is a Nightingale’: An Introduction to Animal Poetics.” Anglistik – International Journal of English Studies 27 (2): 35–46.
———. 2017. “Ciferae in the City.” In American Beasts: Perspectives on Animals, Animality and U.S. Culture, 1776–1920, edited by Dominik Ohrem, 75–99. Berlin: Neofelis.
Berger, John. 1980. “Why Look at Animals?” In About Looking, 3–28. New York: Pantheon.
Bergthaller, Hannes. 2006. “‘Trees are What Everyone Needs’: The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the Problem of Mimesis.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, 155–175. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Bouttier, Sarah. 2015. “Creaturely Texts, Texts on Creatures.” European Journal of English Studies 19 (1): 111–122.
Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies. The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2009. “Toward an Agnostic Animal Ethics.” In The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, by Paola Cavalieri, Matthew Calarco, John M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and Cary Wolfe, 73–84. New York: Columbia University Press.
Claviez, Thomas. 2012. “Jamming What Exactly? Some Notes on the ‘Anthropological Machine’ and the Ethics in Derrida, Agamben, Calarco, and Latour.” Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, 69–80. Heidelberg: Winter.
Coetzee, J. M. 2009. “Notes on Issues Raised by Matthew Calarco.” In The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, by Paola Cavalieri, Matthew Calarco, John M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and Cary Wolfe, 89–91. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press.
Diamond, Cora. 2008. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” In Philosophy and Animal Life, by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, 43–89. New York: Columbia University Press.
Driscoll, Kári. 2015. “The Sticky Temptation of Poetry.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (2): 212–229.
———. 2014. Toward a Poetics of Animality. Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafka. Diss. University of Columbia.
Fudge, Erica. 2016. “Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England.” In Renaissance Posthumanism, edited by Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, 145–166. New York: Fordham University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2005. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins.
———. 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds). 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grimm, Sieglinde. 2014. “Teaching Cultural Ecology from German Romanticism to the Present: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gottfried Keller, and W.G. Sebald.” In Teaching Environments: Ecocritical Encounters, edited by Sieglinde Grimm and Roman Bartosch, 199–215. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
———. 2003. Sprache der Existenz: Rilke, Kafka und die Rettung des Ich im Roman der klassischen Moderne. Tübingen: Francke.
Gurr, Jens Martin. 2010. “Emplotting an Ecosystem: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and the Question of Form in Ecocriticism.” In Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, edited by Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers, and Katrin Thomson, 69–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hardy, Thomas. 1998 [1891]. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. London: Penguin.
Herman, David (ed.). 2016a. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2016b. “Literature beyond the Human.” In Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature, edited by David Herman, 1–15. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2014. “Narratology Beyond the Human.” Diegesis 3 (2): 131–143.
———. 2013. “Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush.” Modern Fiction Studies 59 (3): 547–568.
Hettche, Thomas. 2014. Pfaueninsel. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
Jahn, Manfred. 2007. “Focalization.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman‚ 94–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
James, Erin. 2015. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kendall-Morwick, Karalyn. 2014. “Mongrel Fiction: Canine Bildung and the Feminist Critique of Anthropocentrism in Virginia Woolf’s Flush.” Modern Fiction Studies 60 (3): 506–526.
Kerridge, Richard. 2015. “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality.” In Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 262–276. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Manemann, Jürgen. 2014. Kritik des Anthropozäns: Plädoyer für eine neue Humanökologie. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Massumi, Brian. 2008. “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens.” Inflections 1 (1): 1–40.
McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Mulhall, Stephen. 2009. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Murphy, Patrick D. 1998. “Anotherness and Inhabitation in Recent Multicultural American Literature.” In Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neill Sammells‚ 40–52. New York: Zed Books.
Murphy, Patrick D. 2006. “Grounding Anotherness and Answerability through Allonational Ecoliterature Formations.” In Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, 417–434. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Parham, John. 2012. “Hungry Unlike the Wolf: Ecology, Posthumanism, Narratology in Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour.” Ecozon@ 3 (2): 145–160.
Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press.
Piskorski, Rodolfo. 2015. “Of Zoogrammatology as a Positive Literary Theory.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (2): 230–249.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1910. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by William Needham. http://www.archive.org/stream/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge.
———. 2011. Selected Poems. Translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, edited by Robert Vilain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rohman, Carrie. 2009. Stalking the Subject. Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Stewart, Susan. 2002. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2015. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel. Creature, Affect, Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vermeulen, Pieter and Virginia Richter. 2015. “Introduction: Creaturely Constellations.” European Journal of English Studies 19 (1): 1–9.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2003. Animal Rites. American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Woodward, Wendy. 2008. The Animal Gaze. Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 2009 [1933]. Flush. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zapf, Hubert. 2016. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. London: Bloomsbury.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bartosch, R. (2017). Reading Seeing: Literary Form, Affect, and the Creaturely Potential of Focalization. In: Ohrem, D., Bartosch, R. (eds) Beyond the Human-Animal Divide. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60309-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-93437-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)