In Chapter 3, Donald Wesling explains four modes of thought that are shared by all eight of the example-figures that he brings forward in Chapter 4. These attributes of animalist thinking are: Creativity, or the idea that the senses continually bring in new materials for cognizing, feeling, and saying; Embodied Mind, or the idea that the body, as part of nature, participates in the showing of things; Dialogism, or the idea that ordinary thinking is a continual performance of the many (...) betweens, including me-other, perceiver-perceived, feedback-calibration; and Amplification of Affect, or the premise that in living beings change is everything, and involves a series of interruptions, which are discontinuities in perceiving. Wesling concludes Chapter 3 by analyzing Annie Dillard’s essay on being startled by a wild weasel. (shrink)

Chapter 2 threads an intellectual story about hearing as a sense through a line of examples, both scholarly (example: Michel Serres) and literary (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Perception-into-writing is the focus. The point is that in language, we replace and re-enact an enormous range of movements within the material surround that perception has needed in order to perform. That is how we bring the instinctual, which is invisible, up into the visible, which is the legible. In this book the sentence, and (...) the stringing of sentences called scene, are the carriers of animalist perception. Art sentences, in a novel by Louise Erdrich or in a poem by Ted Hughes, make us more conscious of our positions in time, space, hierarchy, society, the planet. (shrink)

The Afterword and Bibliography are “For Animalists,” using a term defined in the Preface and in Chapters 3–4, because of the author’s wish to recruit the reader of this book to the ranks of a new kind of person. The Afterword extends and concludes the book in a space closer to political action, by these means: mini-stories on topics from alphabets to zoos; direct argument with friends and antagonists; striking statements on the animal question from a careful selection of recent (...) writings by scholars who push further the theme of the book. (shrink)

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve (...) case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read. (shrink)

In Chapter 5 the keynote is movement, which has been a theme in every Chapter but is now essential to analysis of texts that show how the embodied mind is alive in time. The point is that changes of posture and changes of mind are changes in the division of our acts of attention. The array of a dozen works analyzed has a range of eras, types, lengths, structures, languages, including a best-seller hard-boiled novel, a classic French lyric about art-speech, (...) and a mid-length meditation in Romantic blank verse. (Here the book’s only Diagram is a grid showing focus-changes in perception and emotion in the array.) Donald Wesling concludes the whole book with a rationale, unfashionable but unapologetic, for taking every opportunity to name the prosodic and linguistic forms in these twelve items. (shrink)

Chapter 4 is long because each of twelve major thinkers receives his or her own exposé, and each of the essays is preceded by pages that survey one work or many works, combing through to find how each animalist thinker shows the four attributes of Creativity, Embodied Mind, Dialogism, and Amplification of Affect. In the first instance, those attributes taken as a set are what identify the thinkers Donald Wesling puts forward as animalists. This is to invent a tradition where, (...) apparently, no tradition existed. Wesling shows that Lucretius (ancient world), Michel de Montaigne (renaissance), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (romanticism), John Muir (the 19th century), Alphonso Lingis (with the next three, contemporary), Laurie Shannon, Brian Massumi, and Temple Grandin were always there with the attributes of membership. (shrink)

RESUMO Do início até o final de suas publicações, Mikhail Bakhtin escreveu frequentemente a respeito da força da criatividade. Isso foi um tema secundário, mas também uma variante livre e valorativa de seus grandes temas, como dialogismo, cronotopo, carnaval, grande tempo. A definição de Bakhtin que colabora para distinguir o dado, que já existe, do recentemente criado, ajuda-nos, em 2015, a resgatar a criatividade de seus usos desgastados na esfera pública. Uma finalidade deste ensaio é retificar uma expressão valiosa: mostrar (...) o que Bakhtin quer dizer com a cocriatividade daqueles que compreendem1. Outra finalidade é especificar, com o auxílio de Bakhtin, o tipo de criatividade que Alexandr Pushkin realiza nos poemas líricos, narrativos e meditativos em seu momento histórico. Na medida em que formos bem-sucedidos, continuamos um projeto de estudos bakhtinianos cujo objetivo é mostrar como seu pensamento contribui para a interpretação da poesia como uma arte verbal.ABSTRACT From the beginning to the end of his publishing career, Mikhail Bakhtin very often wrote about the force of creativity. This is a secondary theme, but also a freedom-valuing variant of his grand themes of dialogism, chronotope, carnival, great time. Bakhtin's definition, which works to disentangle the existing given from the newly-created, helps us in 2015 to rescue creativity from debased usages in the public sphere. One purpose of this essay is to rectify a valuable term: to show what Bakhtin means by "the co-creativity of those who understand." Another purpose is to specify, with Bakhtin's help, the type of creativity Alexandr Pushkin achieves in his historical moment, in lyric, narrative, and meditative poems. To the extent we are successful, we continue an ongoing project in Bakhtin studies: to show how his thinking aids in the interpretation of poetry as verbal art. (shrink)

Speech, like sound, "exists only when it is passing out of existence."1 Although confounded with the very breath of life, speech dies on the lips that give it form. This undulation of air, whose speechprint is so personal that we have not been able to build machines to recognize it, is born in the body but effaces, forgets the body. This quality of speech, that it takes support form the body but does not reside there, has evoked a debate about (...) the role of voice which was doubtless begun earlier but has never been so sharply discussed, I think, as in the present generation: Must voice and the concept of the speaking subject be defined as a unity? Can we validate a definition of the self and what it means to be human through a physiology of voice or a metaphysics of voice? The logical and chronological priority of empirical speech, of utterances seemingly unplanned and unwritten, is what is at issue in this debate.2· 1. Walter J. Ong, "The Word in Chains," In the Human Grain, p. 53.· 2. Spontaneous utterances are the subject matter of speech-act philosophy and sociolinguistics, disciplines that stress the social and communicative context which helps condition personal speaking. Such a privileging of voice also occurs in modern poetic theory, for example in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and in statements by Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, but usually these writers show to what degree the oral must always remain a fiction in our era.Donald Wesling is professor of English at the University of California, San Diego. The author of The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity, he is currently writing a critique of modern metrical theory, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and Interpretation. (shrink)

The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Böhme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the oppositions between humans and animals. First Donald Wesling proposes new concepts and terms for an animalist mode of interpretation; then he considers radical multispecies writers in science fiction (K.S. Robinson) and in the prose poem (László Krasznahorkai). Last in Chapter 1 he (...) sets up Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) as our best guide on the animal and human body as moving agent of perceiving and thinking. With terms from this phenomenological framework, literary readers may better attend to attention and may read more successfully for perceptual content. (shrink)