Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory

by Cary Wolfe, W. J. T. Mitchell (Foreword by)

Overview

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously "the question of the animal."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226905136
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/01/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Cary Wolfe is a professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author, most recently, of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" and the editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal.

Table of Contents

Foreword, W.J.T. Mitchell
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1. Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism
2. In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal
Part Two
3. Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (with Jonathan Elmer)
4. Aficionados and Friend Killers: Rearticulating Race and Gender via Species in Hemingway
5. Faux Posthumanism: The Discourse of Species and the Neocolonial Project in Michael Crichton's Congo
Conclusion: Postmodern Ethics, the Question of the Animal, and the Imperatives of Posthumanist Theory
Notes
Index