Animate Literacies

Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism

Nathan Snaza

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781478005629
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Human(ities) in Crisis
• 2. Beloved’s Dispersed Pedagogy
• 3. Haunting, Love, and Attention
• 4. Humanizing Assemblages I: What Is Man?
• 5. Slavery, the Human, and Dehumanization
• 6. Literacy, Slavery, and the Education of Desire
• 7. What Is Literacy?
• 8. Humanizing Assemblages II: Discipline and Control
• 9. Bewilderment
• 10. Toward a Literary Ethology
• 11. What Happens When I Read?
• 12. The Smell of Literature
• 13. Pleasures of the Text
• 14. Those Changeful Sites
• 15. Literacies against the State
• 16. Futures of Anima-Literature
• Notes
• References
• Index