Details

Subject(s)

• Animals in literature [Browse]
• Suffering in literature [Browse]
• Levi, Primo 1919-1987—Criticism and interpretation [Browse]
• Levi, Primo 1919-1987—Themes, motives [Browse]

Series

• Palgrave Macmillan animal ethics series [More in this series]
• The Palgrave Macmillan animal ethics series

Summary note

Situation at the intersection of animal studies and literary theory, this book explores the remarkable and subtly pervasive web of animal imagery, metaphors, and concepts in the work of Jewish-Italian writer, chemist, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987). Relatively unexamined by scholars, the complex and extensive animal imagery Levi employed in his literary works offers new insights into the aesthetical and ethical function of testimony, as well as an original perspective on contemporary debates surrounding human-animal relationships and posthumanism. The three main sections that compose the book mirror Levi's approach to non-human animals and animality: from an unquestionable bio-ethical origin ("Suffering"); through an investigation of the relationships between writing, technology, and animality ("Techne"); to a creative intellectual project in which literary animals both counterbalance the inevitable suffering of all creatures, and suggest a transformative image of interspecific community ("Creation")

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-292) and index.

Contents

• Introduction: Primo Levi and the question of the animal : Testimony, identification, literary animals
• Animal studies and Italian literature
• Suffering, techne, creation
• Works cited. Suffering I: shared vulnerability : "Can they suffer?"
• "Contro il dolore" and the debate on animal vivisection
• Works cited. Suffering II: muteness and testimony : Useless violence, bare life, testimony
• Belli's donkey and Hubinek's muteness
• Works cited. Techne I: animal hands : From "Homo Faber" to "Techne"
• The hand that writes: writing as "Techne" and the orangutan
• Works cited. Techne II: hybrids and hubris : Science fiction and the monstrous work of zoomorphism
• Centaurial literature, hybrid "Techne"
• Works cited. Creation I: a new writing : Toward "uno scrivere nuovo"
• Creation and re-creation: Genesis
• Works cited. Creation II: re-enchantment : Invented animals and the work of testimony
• Darwin, Job, and the re-enchantment of the world
• Works cited. Conclusion: animal testimony : Works cited. Works cited. Index.

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ISBN

• 9783319712574 ((hd. bd.))
• 3319712578

LCCN

2018930018

OCLC

1046665945

International Article Number

• 9783319712574

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