Creaturely Love by Dominic Pettman

Creaturely Love by Dominic Pettman

"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 worksThe 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

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.