Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, And The Politics Of Humanism (Thought In The Act)

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 affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upturns common understandings of literacy and its relations to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to the dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, resides in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.

• | Author: Nathan Snaza
• | Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• | Publication Date: Aug 16, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 232 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1478004797
• | ISBN-13: 9781478004790