Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award
The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination
Files
Description
(from the publishers site)
How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them.
The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.
ISBN
9780226650852
Publication Date
2010
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Disciplines
American Literature | Arts and Humanities | Critical and Cultural Studies | Nonfiction | Poetry
Recommended Citation
Payne, Mark, "The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination" (2010). Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award. 4.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpw_bkaw/4
Comments
2010 Winner