Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium

Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern times and argues that the novels of this period reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of “creatureliness.” Scholars have turned to the term “creaturely” recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms—one leading up to the turn of the millennium, and the other appearing after the tragic events of 9/11.

Reviews

Novel Creatures is at once a course in applied socio-political philosophy and a novel in itself. Through the course of its four chapters, I felt as if I had read the ten novels explored and met each cast of characters. Through the lenses of Agamben, Benjamin, Kafka, I achieved an embodied sense of knowing what a post-historical state of human/animal hybridity may achieve.
— Dawnja Burris, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School