Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

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Description

Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them. Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

Reviews

A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recommended. * Anthony Lioi, Professor of Liberal Arts and English, The Julliard School, USA *
Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that arent animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understandings of the human. -- John Miller, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Sheffield, UK

Author Bio

David P. Rando is a Professor in the Department of English at Trinity University, USA.