Overview

To what extent, and in what manner, do storytelling practices accommodate nonhuman subjects and their modalities of experience, and how can contemporary narrative study shed light on interspecies interactions and entanglements? In Narratology beyond the Human, David Herman addresses these questions through a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. Herman considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. In focusing on techniques such as the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Herman argues that existing frameworks for narrative inquiry must be modified to take into account how stories are interwoven with cultural ontologies, or understandings of what sorts of beings populate the world and how they relate to humans. Showing how questions of narrative bear on ideas of species difference and assumptions about animal minds, Narratology beyond the Human underscores our inextricable interconnectedness with other forms of creatural life and suggests that stories can be used to resituate imaginaries of human action in a more-than-human world.

Full Product Details

9780190850432

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Reviews

In this excellent and original book, David Herman interweaves the study of narrative structures (narratology) with the cross-disciplinary field of animal studies in order to produce a powerful, complex new paradigm for understanding animal narrative. This paradigm empowers narratology and human-animal narrative, across a variety of genres, to join in expanding our view of narratively structured creatural worlds. --Marianne DeKoven, Rutgers University A convincing mix of theoretical reflection and close reading, Narratology beyond the Human by David Herman reshapes the fundamental categories of story and storytelling in the post-Darwinian era. After his key contribution to the shift from classic to postclassical narratology, David Herman implements here a new paradigm shift that takes seriously the dismantling of the hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman, elaborating new models for the analysis of interspecies contact and interaction. --Jan Baetens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Author Information

David Herman has taught at institutions that include North Carolina State University, Purdue University, Ohio State University, and, most recently, Durham University in the UK.

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