Beasts of the modern imagination : Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence / / Margot Norris

• Autore: Norris Margot
• Pubblicazione: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (1 online resource (xii, 265 pages :) : illustrations)
• Disciplina: 809/.93384
• Soggetto topico: Psychoanalysis and literature; Literature and science; Art, Modern - 20th century; Mimesis in literature; Animals in literature; Anthropomorphism; Human beings - Animal nature; Comparative literature - Themes, motives; Literature, Modern - 20th century - History and criticism
• Soggetto genere / forma: Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• Soggetto non controllato: Literature: history & criticism
• Note generali: Originally published as Johns Hopkins Press, 1985
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-256) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 1. Introduction: The biocentric tradition -- 2. Darwin's reading of nature -- 3. Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the problem of mimesis -- 5. Nietzsche's Ecce homo: Behold the beast -- 6. Kafka's "Josefine": The animal as the negative site of narration -- 7. Max Ernst: The rhetorical beast of the visual arts -- 8. The ontology of D.H. Lawrence's St. Mawr -- 9. The animal and violence in Hemingway's Death in the afternoon -- 10. Conclusion: The biocentric tradition in context.
• Sommario/riassunto: Originally published in 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination explores a specific tradition in modern thought and art: the critique of anthropocentrism at the hands of "beasts"—writers whose works constitute animal gestures or acts of fatality. It is not a study of animal imagery, although the works that Margot Norris explores present us with apes, horses, bulls, and mice who appear in the foreground of fiction, not as the tropes of allegory or fable, but as narrators and protagonists appropriating their animality amid an anthropocentric universe. These beasts are finally the masks of the human animals who create them, and the textual strategies that bring them into being constitute another version of their struggle. The focus of this study is a small group of thinkers, writers, and artists who create as the animal—not like the animal, in imitation of the animal—but with their animality speaking. The author treats Charles Darwin as the founder of this tradition, as the naturalist whose shattering conclusions inevitably turned back on him and subordinated him, the rational man, to the very Nature he studied. Friedrich Nietzsche heeded the advice implicit in his criticism of David Strauss and used Darwinian ideas as critical tools to interrogate the status of man as a natural being. He also responded to the implications of his own animality for his writing by transforming his work into bestial acts and gestures. The third, and last, generation of these creative animals includes Franz Kafka, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and D. H. Lawrence. In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.
• Titolo autorizzato: Beasts of the Modern Imagination
• ISBN: 1-4214-3132-7
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910524846103321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II