Choreographies of the Living

Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Goes against nearly all claims in aesthetic theory and philosophy that aesthetic capacities are ultimately human, and human only
Draws on the work of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz, proposing bioaesthetics as an ethically charged category for reading the artistic impulses and experiences of all living creatures
Makes the claim that humans' artistic capacities are pre-dated by other animals' artistic capabilities

Choreographies of the Living

Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Description

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.

Choreographies of the Living

Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: Nude Vibrations: Isadora Duncan's Creatural Aesthetic
Chapter Two: Creative Incantations and Involutions in D. H. Lawrence
Chapter Three: Woolf's Floating Monkeys and Whirling Women
Chapter Four: Strange Prosthetics: Rachel Rosenthal's Rats and Rings
Chapter Five: UnCaging Cunningham's Animals
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Choreographies of the Living

Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Author Information

Carrie Rohman, Associate Professor of English, Lafayette College

Carrie Rohman is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College and the author of Stalking the Subject (2008).

Choreographies of the Living

Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Reviews and Awards

"Drawing on her intimate knowledge of dance as much as on her scholarly studies of literature, art, and performance, Rohman elaborates the thesis that in fact art has deep roots in the nonhuman world, and that the same creative force that impels us to make it also courses through the non-human animals from whom it-and we-are descended [...] Rohman makes clear, bioaesthetics calls for nothing less than a radical revision to our understanding of art [...] Rohman presents her ideas with merciful clarity, and the book should be accessible to the art-curious from all disciplines [...] In an era that's witnessing a growing respect for the intelligence of the body, the bioaesthetic call for a rethinking of art could hardly be more timely." - The Brooklyn Rail