Abstract
This chapter continues the debate of ‘creature feeling’ and addresses new media and the more-than-human by returning to key questions in environmental and transcultural education and introducing the concept of frames. Discussing film (District 9) as well as children’s literature and graphic novels (The Stranger and The Rabbits), it sets out to approach the ‘species scale’ (David Herman) of narratives through a variety of media formats with different demands on linguistic capability. It uses well-known educational concepts such as ‘stubborn subjectivity’, ‘understanding alterity’, ‘transformation’ and cooperative tasks and opens the conversation this book has begun for new media and inclusive contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Anthropological difference’ is a translation of the German expression anthropologische Differenz, usually referred to as ‘human exceptionalism ’ in the English discussion. Whether on religious, moral or scientific grounds, human exceptionalism describes the assumption of an inherent and unquestionable superiority of humans over any other animal. Différance famously describes Derrida’s finding that reading can infinitely defer meaning and thus help deconstruct logocentrism. It was only after the completion of the first draft of this book that my attention was brought to Tom Ryan (2001) who speaks of ‘anthropological différance ’ in the context of anthropological research.
- 2.
The qualifier ‘strictly speaking’ here is an important one. For, to be perfectly honest, I am not sure what to make of this strictness: Of course, animal studies does not mean that we are talking about our favourite pets all the time (although scholars in the field show a tendency for portraits with their companion animals). But is it really possible, would one have been drawn to this field, without a general interest in the plight on non-human animals, in ethics—humanist or posthumanist—and creaturely empathy? I doubt it—and wonder if such a caveat would have been felt necessary in other scholarly domains (‘One does not have to like Non-European humans to do postcolonial studies’)? For a suggestion what ‘creaturely ’ reading might entail, see Bartosch (2017), Vermeulen (2015), and Bouttier (2015).
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Bartosch, R. (2019). Framing Framing: Aliens, Animals, and Anthropological Différance Across Media. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33300-3_6
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