David P. Rando – författare

Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce’s fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando explores how Joyce’s texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce’s approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.

Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce’s fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando explores how Joyce’s texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce’s approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.

Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction's wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it. In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.

Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction’s wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it. In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.

Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human dreams boldly about literary possibility in this moment of AI’s technological and social immaturity. Through the wishful image of artificial fiction, this book explores the potential of new realisms, new modernisms and new genres that present new epistemologies, new ontologies and new pleasures and experiences for readers. While helping us to recognise and reimagine human-centredness in literary theory and practice, this book also 'looks back' at human fiction as a genre to consider what is distinctive and valuable about it, demonstrating that human fiction and artificial fiction have roles to play in imagining and learning to respect lives and experiences of every variety.

This book proposes that new music technologies attract unconscious desires for socialism and collectivity, enabling millions of people living under capitalism to dream of repressed social alternatives.