Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

Autorentext

Donald Wesling is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at UC San Diego, USA. He has published on Wordsworth, John Muir, Edward Dorn, and Bakhtin; on rhyme, meter, and avant-garde prosody; and on how voice and emotion get into writing. 

Klappentext
Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

Zusammenfassung

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

Inhalt

Foreword: Animalist Perception and Interpretation 

Part I: Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans

      1. How the Razor's Edge Becomes a Saw to the Armed Vision

      2. Intellectual Histories of the Imbroglio Human/Nonhuman

      3. Jacques Derrida and Gernot Böhme: Critique of Existing Discourses on Our Animality

      4. Literary Imbroglios: SciFi and Prose Poem       5. With Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Perception Into Writing

Part II: Perception, Cognition, Writing       1. Perception and Sentence-Style

      2. Replacing Perception into the Continuity of Cognition, Emotion, and Memory

      3. Four Scholars on Five Senses

      4. The Creations of Sound          5. A Second Look at Single Sentences

Part III: Attributes of Animalist Thinking

       1, Intercreatural

     2. Creativity

     3.Embodied Mind

     4. Dialogism

      5. Amplification of Affect, With an Example from Annie Dillard

Part IV: Animalist Thinking From Lucretius to Temple Grandin

         1. Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans, Once Again

       2. Lucretius

         3. Michel de Montaigne

        4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge         5. John Muir

        6. Alphonso Lingis

        7. Laurie Shannon

        8. Brian Massumi

        9. Temple Grandin

        10. What Ice-Age Caves Afford to Aurochs in Manganese

  Part V: Perception and Expectation in Literature

       1. Our Experience of the Body, Ready for an Imaginary Action

       2. Perception and Expectation in the Array of 12

         3. Uses of the Array of 12 as a Return to the Material Universe        4. The Role of Animalist Perception in Literature       

Afterword: Alphabet for Animalists