Animist Engagement Seminar: Jemma Deer, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World

Jemma Deer (@geowrites) is a Researcher-in-Residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich, Germany). She works at the intersection of literary studies, deconstruction and the environmental humanities, and is is interested in the ways in which ecological crises are transforming our understanding of the world and our place within it. Her first book, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World is published by Bloomsbury. She co-hosts EcoCast, the official podcast of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and is Narrator and Associate Producer of Shakespeare for All. She is currently working on a project on fungi in literature.

Jemma Deer will present on her book, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World. This book offers a theory of animism for an age of environmental crisis, elaborated through innovative readings of classic and contemporary literary texts. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism shows how ‘literary animism’, the active and transformative life of literature, can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.