Animal Visions : Posthumanist Dream Writing

Resource Information

The work Animal Visions : Posthumanist Dream Writing represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Animal Visions : Posthumanist Dream Writing

Title remainder

Posthumanist Dream Writing

Statement of responsibility

by Susan Mary Pyke

Creator

• Pyke, Susan Mary

Subject

• British literature
• Fiction
• Fiction
• Literature -- Philosophy
• Literature -- Philosophy
• British literature

Language

eng

Summary

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker's poem "Obsession" (1992) and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (1997) most strongly extend Brontë's dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush's music video "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and Peter Kosminsky's film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart's novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath's poem, "Wuthering Heights" (1961). Brontë's Wuthering Heights and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold's film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world

Member of

• Palgrave studies in animals and literature

Cataloging source

VT2

Dewey number

809.41

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature