Choreographies of the Living
Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8098815 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carrie Rohman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 200 |
| Publication date | 2018-05-24 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Choreographies of the Living (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780190604400.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2804817329 |
| Open Library | OL28647876M |
| ISBN | 9780190604400 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices
Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Art · Art history · Dance · Literature · Performative utterance · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Art and science · Biology · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |