New Book by Researcher-in-Residence Jemma Deer
Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World
18.09.2020
Deer’s new book, published by Bloomsbury Collections (2020, online) is a must-read for those interested in literature studies (especially environmental literature), ethics, multispecies studies, and the state of the planet more generally.
“The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how ‘literary animism’ – the active and transformative life of literature – can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.”