Tatti Wattles is an illustrated fable about the meaning of love. Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal tells of the life and death of Tatti Wattles, her beloved pet rat. Many know Rosenthal as a storyteller and premier theatrical performer, and now her imaginative drawing skills-a never-before-seen side of this multifaceted artist-are revealed through the story of her life with Tatti and the shamanic journey she took after his death. Formatted as a children's book with beautiful four-color and black-and-white drawings, Tatti Wattles: A Love Story traces their collaboration from her first glimpse of him to the legendary presence he became in the artist's world. Afterword by Jacki Apple.

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about “seeing” to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art. H. Peter Steeves is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday and the editor of Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, both also published by SUNY Press.

A guide to shadow work with animal teachers • Explains how the animals we fear or dislike can help us recognize and investigate our shadow side: the hated, abandoned, judged, and denied aspects of ourselves • Explores the lessons of a wide variety of shadow animals, including snakes, rats, bats, and spiders, as well as those that only seem shadowy to some, such as dogs, cats, birds, and horses • Looks at the elements of the psyche each shadow animal represents and presents thirteen animal-inspired exercises designed to examine, embrace, and integrate our shadow selves We often project qualities onto animals that we don’t wish to admit in ourselves. Thus, snakes are evil, spiders are creepy, rats are dirty, and so on. As Dawn Baumann Brunke explains, the animals we fear or dislike can help us to recognize our Shadow: the hated, abandoned, judged, and denied aspects of ourselves. As teachers and guides, shadow animals can help us to reclaim the inner strengths, abilities, and wisdom that we have forgotten or disowned. Brunke explores the lessons of numerous shadow animals, including those that many think of as shadowy, such as snakes and bats, as well as those that only seem shadowy to some, such as dogs, cats, birds, and horses. Though shadow animals may initially appear frightening, they offer profound healing and expert guidance in helping us identify, learn from, and embrace our shadow selves. Brunke explains how shadow animals represent unexamined elements of the psyche--from secret fears and suppressed emotions to unacknowledged prejudices and repressed trauma. She presents thirteen animalinspired exercises, each uniquely designed to help us find and better understand the lost, wounded pieces of our psyche. Presenting an animal-centered guide to shadow work, Brunke reveals how shadow animals protect and advise, challenge and encourage, inspire and offer support to the spiritual adventure of enlightenment as we awaken to who we really are.

Contains information, advice, games, exercises, and experiments to access your natural ability to communicate with the animal kingdom.

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume’s eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of “the human” vis-à-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.