Zoo-Optics
Mutant Ethology and Nonhuman Visualities in VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11059326 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jeremy Chow (0000-0002-3027-3806, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 532-549 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Fiction Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-7729 • E-ISSN: 2327-6207 |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sfs.2022.0051 |
| OpenAlex | W4307951212 |
| Language | EN |
Literary, theoretical, and zoological discussions of the nonhuman animal often default to ethological observation; that is, how humans observe and make sense of nonhuman behavior. This essay reworks that paradigm to highlight how nonhuman animal mutants participate in their own form of ethological observation with particular attention to Annihilation—both Jeff Vandermeer's novel and the film adaptation by Alex Garland. It theorizes a notion of zoo-optics from the seemingly panoptic presence of mutated creatures in Annihilation to offer a new method of seeing and experiencing in the Anthropocene. Zoo-optics makes visible theentanglement of environmental, social, and planetary realities that we must navigate in our era of climate change
Adaptation (eye) · Anthropocene · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biology · Cognitive science · Creatures · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethology · Natural (archaeology) · Posthumanism · Trilogy · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|