Animals, Affect, and Climate: The Counterhuman Imaginary

3.0 credits · Graduate

This course juxtaposes core strains of current posthumanist theory-new materialism or thing theory, the affective turn, ecocriticism or environmental humanities, and literary animal studies. Using eighteenth-century literature, culture, and intellectual discourse as a starting point and then sampling related materials in the Anglo-American tradition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will define these theoretical scenarios, and evaluate the broader impact of approaches to the other-than-human in literary theory and in formal critique. Texts (and selections): Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Voltaire, Candide; Auster, Timbuktu; Heise, Imagining Extinction; Kohn, How Forests Think; Braidotti, The Posthuman.