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Animal Visions

Posthumanist Dream Writing

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Susan Mary Pyke

    1. School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

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  • Presents a theoretical framework that considers posthuman dream writing as a conduit to politically charged affective reading, through the vantage of literary animal studies
  • Argues that posthuman dream writing can resist exclusionary assumptions of human stewardship over nonhuman animals through an analysis that firstly intersects with radical feminist insights that consider the depiction of dreams and visions as an avenue to imagine different social orderings
  • Concludes that the progressions offered by posthuman dream writing allow empathetic readers the opportunity to imagine less masterful human relations with nonhuman animals and their habitats

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
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  2. Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 1-103

  3. Artful Dream Writing into the Roots

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 105-160

  4. Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 161-194

  5. Moor Loving

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 195-234

  6. Respecting and Trusting the Beast

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 235-266

  7. Animal Grace

    • Susan Mary Pyke
    Pages 267-285

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 287-314
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Keywords

About this book

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.



Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Susan Mary Pyke

About the author

Susan Mary Pyke teaches creative writing, literary criticism and environmental studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She writes articles and essays in the shared fields of animal studies, literary criticism and ecocriticism, as well as fiction and poetry. 

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