The animalizing imagination
Subtitle: totemism, textuality and ecocriticism
Publisher: Macmillan Press Ltd
Published: 1999
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 171
ISBN-13: 9780333770825
Subjects: Symboler; Semiotik; Kulturstudier; Dyr; Religion
Description: This text argues that animals appear not just as biological creatures, but as vehicles of meaning for human imagination, mind and culture. Animal life may form the basis for an animalizing imagination that can enhance our cultural, religious and aesthetic sensibilities. This imagination is rooted in the pre-modern affective relationship between shamans and their familiars, but can be tracked to our post-modern ecological crisis, where we can reclaim a totemic identification with animals as signifiers of a new ecological understanding.

This text argues that animals appear not just as biological creatures, but as vehicles of meaning for human imagination, mind and culture.
Table of contents: title: The burden of the beasts; aesthetic animals; suffering animals; literary beasts; animals and information.