Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy - Paperback

by Danielle Sands (Author)

Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects - beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy. Along the way she encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois.

Front Jacket

Navigates varied approaches to the representation of the nonhuman Is it possible to read, write and think non-anthropocentrically? To compare what literature and philosophy can teach us about the nonhuman? By pursuing underexplored areas of Animal Studies within five interdisciplinary chapters, Danielle Sands proposes a thinking of and with animals that draws on a range of affects from empathy to disgust. Examining the benefits of empathy in facilitating cross-species understanding and kinship, Sands also reveals its limits. Danielle Sands is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London and Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy, LSE.

Author Biography

Danielle Sands is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway University of London.