Reading the Nonhuman: Literary Studies in the Anthropocene
Reading the Nonhuman: Literary Studies in the Anthropocene

Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses a few aspects of approaches embracing the nonhuman inliterary and cultural studies and in theoretical approaches associated with the categoryof posthumanism. I connect such approaches with post-structural theories, findingin them connections with the later readings of the Anthropocene and their critique ofanthropocentrism. Roland Barthes’s “deauthoration” of literary works clearly gesturestowards an opening to the other, which in more recent approaches has been adapted intocomplex networks and connections with Donna Haraway’s companion species. Similarly,Derrida’s problematization of the division into inside and outside takes part in looking forreconnections with broadly understood environmental thinking. My task is to show thatvariously labelled critical and post-critical discourses can hardly be divided into separate,specialized disciplinary fields, but constitute a network, or a composition, of proposalsaddressing the spectre of the necessity of changing the great divide of man and nature.

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