© Columbia University Press
Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film
Paper, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14787-3
$26.50
/ £18.50
March, 2011
Cloth, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14786-6
$79.50
/ £55.00
"Even more than Anat Pick’s preparation and energetic writing, the quality of thought conveyed in this book may be its most significant feature. Here is an original thesis, built from, around, with, and against existing work in related (and unrelated) areas, timely and singular, contributing to several fields and disciplines. The ‘creaturely poetics’ invoked by Pick work through problems in philosophy, critical theory, film criticism, and literary studies; they address historical questions such as the Holocaust, theoretical/ethical concerns including ‘speciesism,’ and formal and aesthetic concerns relating to modes and genres in film and literature. Very few scholars can do what Pick has achieved: blending credible film analysis and criticism with animal studies and critical thought." — Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
"An incredibly inspiring and novel approach to rethinking human relationships with animals. With its compelling account of an ethics based on attentiveness and responsiveness to the vulnerability of animal beings, Pick’s important book will steer animal ethics and animals studies discussions in new and productive directions." — Matthew Calarco, author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
"Creaturely Poetics explores the charged, incandescent space in which the ordinary or the everyday and the mystical or the theological cross on the site of what we call tthe animal.’ Working through a dazzling array of readings in literature, film, and philosophy, Pick holds the complex thought of Simone Weil as a lifeline in what is an unflinching and courageous confrontation with the ways we evade what it means to share the earth with our fellow creatures." — Cary Wolfe, author of What Is Posthumanism
"Animals and the Human Imagination soars. Intellectually exciting, smart, and accessible, this volume will intrigue and revolt, surprise and inspire. The opening overview by Gross is a tour de force and each essay fascinates. Collectively they offer an invitation to think in new ways about what we, perhaps wrongly, call our humanity. I can’t imagine a better introduction to the essential new field of critical animal studies." — Jonathan Safran Foer