A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning

What Is Posthumanism? By CARY WOLFE. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology

The Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues, especially at the global scale (the so-called 'Anthropocene') forms a new challenge of inventiveness for both literature and criticism. Ecocriticism has been going through a period of radical change and has become a diverse and huge field on the exciting but unstable boundary between the humanities and the sciences, with a mix of cultural, political, scientific and activist strands. Its mantra is that the environmental crisis demands a reconsideration of society's basic values, constitution and purposes, and that art and literature can be vital in that work. As a leading figure in this field, Timothy Clark surveys recent developments in ecocriticism lucidly, but also sometimes critically. This book examines ecopoetics, material ecocriticism, and the ideas of world literature as well as contentious claims that we are living in a new geological epoch.

The Value of Ecocriticism

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=etd

A Deweyan-Based Curriculum for Teaching Ethical Inquiry in the Language Arts

Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) takes its place alongside Orlando as a key modernist experiment with the norms and conventions of life writing. Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. Furthermore, in modeling nonhuman phenomenology, Flush suggests how coming to terms with stories about nonhuman lives calls for a new, “transdisciplinary” paradigm for narrative inquiry.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v059/59.3.herman.pdf

Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf's Flush

"A Salutary Scar": Muriel Spark's Desegregated Art in the Twenty-first Century

To provide a point of entry into the special issue, my introduction begins with a discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s 2014 story “Pending Vegan,” which concerns a visit to SeaWorld and explores institutions, practices, and attitudes that are centrally important for the study of animal worlds in modern fiction. I then move to an overview of cross-disciplinary conversations about animals and human-animal relationships being conducted under rubrics such as critical animal studies, posthumanism, cognitive ethology, and zoosemiotics, and suggest how the essays included in the present issue intervene in the larger context for research afforded by these conversations.

/pdf/animal-worlds-in-modern-fiction-an-introduction-4aalteic8m.pdf

David Herman

Papers

Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf's Flush

"A Salutary Scar": Muriel Spark's Desegregated Art in the Twenty-first Century

Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction

Book Review: A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity

Book Review: Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree