Modern Animalism : Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature

You face a square of transparent glass hemmed in by immutable black walls. Within its depths of clear glass flow delicate translucent blobs, rings of luminous membrane alive with a languid self-exposure. Reaching, touching, contracting, hanging in space, they secrete startling effects of colour and imperceptible motion. They slide over and against each other, or face each other, in static, pregnant emptiness as you face them. Something tugs at you, the pull exerted by pictures of life, but here without any recognizable face or form. Is it because these small, radiant figures evoke a memory of cellular plasm under microscope glass, or of protozoan life adrift in its watery layers? We know we are made of something like this. We even know that in a court of law, something akin to this, the blobby genetic substance of our cells, is what identifies us absolutely, so that we cannot escape recognition, a face we cannot darken or turn aside. But these images are paint, and explicitly painting effects; there is no illusionistic subterfuge. Beside the black box the artist, Rui Pimenta, has placed a printed title that reads as a caption: that subtle knot which makes us human (see colour plate 1). So it is not a window, but a mirror. Nearby, a kindred scene embedded in glass bears the caption: my soul takes limbs of flesh. 1 You would not be mistaken, then, to recognize an image of creaturely life here, indeed of human life -and a moment of silent, gorgeous human contact, however microbiotic, in these Plate 1 Rui Pimenta, that subtle knot which makes us human, 2009. Resin, latex, and ink on Plexiglas. Collection of the artist. Plate 2 Paul Gauguin, Te Rerioa (The Dream), 1897. Oil on canvas.

From T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney to C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, modern writing has been filled with strange new hybrid human-animal creatures. Feeding on consumer society, these ‘modern primitive’ figures often challenge mainstream ideals by discovering wealth in habitats and resources rather than in economic exchange. What compels our post-human identification with these characters?

Modern Animalism explores representations of the human-animal ‘problem creature’ in a broad assortment of literature and comics from the late nineteenth century to the present — including authors such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Moore, Murakami, Pullman, Coetzee, and Atwood, and comics creators such as McCay, Herriman, Miyazaki, and Morrison. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, from environmental economics to psychology, Glenn Willmott examines modern and post-modern allegories of the environment, the animal, and economics, highlighting the enduring and seductive appeal of the modern primitive in an age when living with less remains a powerful cultural wish.

From T. S. Eliot's Sweeney to C. S. Lewis's Aslan, modern writing has been filled with strange new hybrid human-animal creatures. Feeding on consumer society, these 'modern primitive' figures often challenge mainstream ideals by discovering wealth in habitats and resources rather than in economic exchange. What compels our post-human identification with these characters? Modern Animalism explores representations of the human-animal 'problem creature' in a broad assortment of literature and comics from the late nineteenth century to the present -- including authors such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Moore, Murakami, Pullman, Coetzee, and Atwood, and comics creators such as McCay, Herriman, Miyazaki, and Morrison. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, from environmental economics to psychology, Glenn Willmott examines modern and post-modern allegories of the environment, the animal, and economics, highlighting the enduring and seductive appeal of the modern primitive in an age when living with less remains a powerful cultural wish. Modern Animalism explores representations of the human-animal 'problem creature' in a broad assortment of literature and comics from the late nineteenth century to the present -- including authors such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Moore, Murakami, Pullman, Coetzee, and Atwood, and comics creators such as McCay, Herriman, Miyazaki, and Morrison. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, from environmental economics to psychology, Glenn Willmott examines modern and post-modern allegories of the environment, the animal, and economics, highlighting the enduring and seductive appeal of the modern primitive in an age when living with less remains a powerful cultural wish."--Pub. desc