Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World

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The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how literary animism the active and transformative life of literature can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

Reviews

Not only does Radical Animism dig deep into the roots of animism and reveal its relations to climate change and other disquieting (s)cenes of the Anthropos, but it does so by means of seismic analyses of texts from Kafka to Woolf, from Shakespeare to Freud, that shout aloud Jemma Deers claim that 'nonliving forces read and write'. This book is just asking to be arrested. * David Wills, Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA *

Author Bio

Jemma Deer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, USA.