Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism

Thought in the Act

by Nathan Snaza

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

Published August 16, 2019

Reviews

[Cana McGhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

“anima-literature, as the study of what animates literacy and how literacy animates us, has a particular orientation, although it might be more accurate to say that it has a particular disorientation.” (158)

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful exploration of an other-side to literary and humanities studies.