Imbroglios of humans and nonhumans

pp. 1-40

in: Donald Wesling, Animal perception and literary language, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Böhme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the oppositions between humans and animals. First Donald Wesling proposes new concepts and terms for an animalist mode of interpretation; then he considers radical multispecies writers in science fiction (K.S. Robinson) and in the prose poem (László Krasznahorkai). Last in Chapter 1 he sets up Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) as our best guide on the animal and human body as moving agent of perceiving and thinking. With terms from this phenomenological framework, literary readers may better attend to attention and may read more successfully for perceptual content.