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6 books match the query 'Animal'
Animal, Vegetable, Digital
Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental PoeticsElizabeth Swanstrom
University of Alabama Press, 2016
An audacious, interdisciplinary study that combines the burgeoning fields of digital aesthetics and eco-criticism
In Animal, Vegetable, Digital, Elizabeth Swanstrom makes a confident and spirited argument for the use of digital art in support of ameliorating human engagement with the environment and suggests a four-part framework for analyzing and discussing such applications.
Through close readings of a panoply of texts, artworks, and cultural artifacts, Swanstrom demonstrates that the division popular culture has for decades observed between nature and technology is artificial. Not only is digital technology not necessarily a brick in the road to a dystopian future of environmental disaster, but digital art forms can be a revivifying bridge that returns people to a more immediate relationship to nature as well as their own embodied selves.
To analyze and understand the intersection of digital art and nature, Animal, Vegetable, Digital explores four aesthetic techniques: coding, collapsing, corresponding, and conserving. “Coding” denotes the way artists use operational computer code to blur distinctions between the reader and text, and, hence, the world. Inviting a fluid conception of the boundary between human and technology, “collapsing” voids simplistic assumptions about the human body’s innate perimeter. The process of translation between natural and human-readable signs that enables communication is described as “corresponding.” “Conserving” is the application of digital art by artists to democratize large- and small-scale preservation efforts.
A fascinating synthesis of literary criticism, communications and journalism, science and technology, and rhetoric that draws on such disparate phenomena as simulated environments, video games, and popular culture, Animal, Vegetable, Digital posits that partnerships between digital aesthetics and environmental criticism are possible that reconnect humankind to nature and reaffirm its kinship with other living and nonliving things.
Behold an Animal
Four Exorbitant ReadingsThangam Ravindranathan
Northwestern University Press, 2019
As animals recede from our world, what tale is being told by literature’s creatures? Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings examines incongruous animals in the works of four major contemporary French writers: an airborne horse in a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, extinct orangutans in Éric Chevillard, stray dogs in Marie NDiaye, vanishing (bits of) hedgehogs in Marie Darrieussecq. Resisting naturalist assumptions that an animal in a story is simply—literally or metaphorically—an animal, Thangam Ravindranathan understands it rather as the location of something missing. The animal is a lure: an unfinished figure fleeing the frame, crossing bounds of period, genre, even medium and language. Its flight traces an exorbitant (self-)portrait in which thinking admits to its commerce with life and flesh. It is in its animals, at the same time unbearably real and exquisitely unreal, that literature may today be closest to philosophy.
This book’s primary focus is the contemporary French novel and continental philosophy. In addition to Toussaint, Chevillard, NDiaye, and Darrieussecq, it engages the work of Jean de La Fontaine, Eadweard Muybridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, and Francis Ponge.
Inside Science
Stories from the Field in Human and Animal ScienceRobert E. Kohler
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Resident observing takes place across a range of sciences, from anthropology and sociology to primatology, wildlife ecology, and beyond. What makes it special, Kohler argues, is the direct access it affords scientists to the contexts in which their subjects live and act. These scientists understand their subjects not by keeping their distance but by living among them and engaging with them in ways large and small. This approach also demonstrates how science and everyday life—often assumed to be different and separate ways of knowing—are in fact overlapping aspects of the human experience. This story-driven exploration is perfect for historians, sociologists, and philosophers who want to know how scientists go about making robust knowledge of nature and society.
My Life as an Animal
StoriesLaurie Stone
Northwestern University Press, 2017
A woman meets a man and falls in love. She is sixty, a writer and lifelong New Yorker raised by garmentos. She thought this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again. He is English, so who knows what he thinks. He is fifty-six, a professor now living in Arizona, the son of a bespoke tailor. As the first of Laurie Stone’s linked stories begins, the writer contemplates what life would be like in the desert with the professor. As we learn how she became the person she is, we also come to know the artists and politics of the downtown scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, a cultural milieu that remains alive in her. In sharply etched prose, Stone presents a woman constantly seduced by strangers, language, the streets— even a wildlife trail. Her characters realize that they feel at home in dislocation—in always living in two places at the same time: east and west, past and present, the bed and the grave (or copper urn). Love may not last, the writer knows. Then again, when has anything you thought about the future turned out right?
The Leopard in the Garden
Animal and Human Lives in Paris at the First Public Zoo of the Modern EraRichard W. Burkhardt, Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2026
The Paris menagerie at the Paris Museum of Natural History has a special significance in the history of zoos. Founded in 1793–1794 at the height of the French Revolution, it was the model for the other great zoos of the nineteenth century that followed, beginning with London in 1828, Amsterdam in 1838, and Berlin in 1844.
Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. has written the definitive history of the Paris zoo and its early inhabitants, human and nonhuman. The book features narrative or thematic chapters interwoven with chapters focused on particular animals. Combining current scholarship with fresh discoveries gleaned from his immersion in the Paris Zoo’s extensive archive, Burkhardt shares historical treasures that illuminate not only the workings of the menagerie but also various dimensions of the golden age of French zoology (the years of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Georges Cuvier). His history reconstructs the diverse sources of specimens, the growth of the collection over time, the efforts to make the menagerie scientifically significant, contemporary attitudes toward animals, and the lives of the animals themselves in colonial and diplomatic contexts.
Two Lessons on Animal and Man
Gilbert Simondon
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Simondon is a secret password among certain discussions within philosophy today. As a philosopher of technology, Simondon’s work has a place at the forefront of current thinking in media, technology, psychology, and philosophy with complex accounts of man’s relationship to technology and the realm that continues to form itself via this tension between man and his technical universe. In this introduction to Simondon’s oeuvre, the reader has access to the grounding of one of the most fundamental and critical questions that has been the focus of philosophy for millennia: the relationship between man and animal.