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What Is Extinction? Joshua Schuster

What Is Extinction? By Joshua Schuster

What Is Extinction? by Joshua Schuster


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What Is Extinction? Summary

What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals by Joshua Schuster

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.
Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.
What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

About Joshua Schuster

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

Table of Contents

Introduction | 1
Part I
1 Photographing the Last Animal | 43
2 Indigeneity and Anthropology in Last Worlds | 69
Part II
3 Literary Extinctions and the Existentiality of Reading | 109
4 Concepts of Extinction in the Holocaust | 134
Part III
5 Critical Theory for the Critically Endangered | 167
6 What Is De-Extinction? | 198
Conclusion | 231
Acknowledgments | 247
Notes | 251
Index | 279

Additional information

NGR9781531501655
9781531501655
1531501656
What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals by Joshua Schuster
New
Paperback
Fordham University Press
2023-02-21
304
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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