Creaturely Love

Dominic Pettman is professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research. His books include Infinite Distraction, Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minnesota, 2011), Look at the Bunny, Love and Other Technologies, and Sonic Intimacy.

"Pettman has written yet another absorbing, witty, moving, and smart book about the question of human exceptionalism, this time in relation to desire and love, attending especially to literary and artistic works. The book makes a significant contribution particularly to a revisionist reading of modernist literary/artistic history with relation to the presence of the nonhuman animal, or the creaturely."-Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz"Dominic Pettman writes thoughtful, light-fingered books on significant questions that are simultaneously timely and timeless. In Creaturely Love, he takes up the perennial awkwardness that haunts every effort to etherealize romance: the proximity of our loving bodies to the critter-creatures that rut and tread and mount and cover each other just outside our windows. Drawing on the newest (and some of the oldest) thinking about humans and animals, Pettman here recalls us to ourselves-by ruminating on just how hard it is to say what exactly that might mean."-D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University"Bettman’s ideas and readings will doubtless find application in future scholarship; his text makes readers eager to see all genres of cultural production in the new framework this exciting work provides."-The Goose"The book offers an interesting engagement with the complexity of expressions of affection."-CHOICE connect

• ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: On the Stupidity of Oysters1. Divining Creaturely Love2. Horsing Around: The Marriage Blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-SalomÉ, and RÉe3. Groping for an Opening: Rilke between Animal and Angel4. Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou5. Between Perfection and Temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica6. The Biological Travesty7. “The Creature Whom We Love”: Proust and Jealousy8. The Love Tone: Capture and Captivation9. “The Soft Word That Comes Deceiving”: Fournival’s Bestiary of Love10. The Cuckold and the Cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt11. The Animal Bride and Horny Toads12. Unsettled Being: Ovid’s Metamorphoses13. Fickle Metaphysics14. Nymphomania and Faunication15. Senseless Arabesques: Wendy and Lucy16. The Goat in the Machine (A Reprise)Conclusion: On Cetaceous MaidensEpilogue: Animal Magnetism and Alternative Currents (or Tesla and the White Dove)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex