Duke University Press Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Thought in the Act)

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 affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upturns common understandings of literacy and its relations to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to the dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, resides in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production. Review "[Animate Literacies] can help us to imagine our way out of the colonial structures that order academic libraries and librarianship."--Melissa Adler "College and Research Libraries" (1/5/2022 12:00:00 AM)"Snaza's book provides a rich ensemble of literary accounts that illustrate his expanded notion of literacy. . . . Animate Literacies is a demonstration of both the vitality and the crisis of the humanities, sitting at a point where different roads cross, as it simultaneously takes on a speculative and a critical approach to the concept of literacy."--Ana Marques "Expanded Literacies" (11/10/2021 12:00:00 AM)"This book is delightfully peripatetic, crisscrossing critical fields and literary texts with acuity and grace. Pulled into these movements, we become 'reading things' that cannot but feel the very bewilderment so key to building alternate futures."--Erica Fretwell "Studies in the Novel" (9/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)"Dovetailing feminist and queer new materialism, posthumanism, affect theory, ecocriticism, and a touch of Marx and Foucault, Animate Literacies demands a lot of its reader, though it almost always, rewards strenuous attention with its rich and energizing combination of love and critique."--Margaret Mendenhall "Ethnic and Third World Literatures" (6/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)"Challenging us to discover, create, and practice modes of literacy that depart from the conventional paths that have disciplined us, Nathan Snaza puts forth significant and bracing provocations about the relationship between reading and the production of Man. In his brilliant formulation, literacy is no longer exclusively human--it happens within a thick web of animating entities that affect and bewilder. An outstanding work."--Stacy Alaimo, author of "Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times""Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving new materialism together with postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human."--Carla Freccero, author of "Queer/Early/Modern" Review “Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving together new materialism and postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human.” Author: Carla Freccero, author of Source: Queer/Early/Modern From the Author Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. About the Author Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond.