Animate Literacies

“Challenging us to discover, create, and practice modes of literacy that depart from the conventional paths that have disciplined us, Nathan Snaza puts forth significant and bracing provocations about the relationship between reading and the production of Man. In his brilliant formulation, literacy is no longer exclusively human—it happens within a thick web of animating entities that affect and bewilder. An outstanding work.” - Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

“Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving new materialism together with postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human.” - Carla Freccero, author of Queer/Early/Modern

"Dovetailing feminist and queer new materialism, posthumanism, affect theory, ecocriticism, and a touch of Marx and Foucault, Animate Literacies demands a lot of its reader, though it almost always, rewards strenuous attention with its rich and energizing combination of love and critique." - Margaret Mendenhall, Ethnic and Third World Literatures

“This book is delightfully peripatetic, crisscrossing critical fields and literary texts with acuity and grace. Pulled into these movements, we become 'reading things' that cannot but feel the very bewilderment so key to building alternate futures.”

"Snaza’s book provides a rich ensemble of literary accounts that illustrate his expanded notion of literacy. . . . Animate Literacies is a demonstration of both the vitality and the crisis of the humanities, sitting at a point where different roads cross, as it simultaneously takes on a speculative and a critical approach to the concept of literacy." - Ana Marques, Expanded Literacies

"In Animate Literacies, Nathan Snaza offers productive alternatives to literacy, literature, and being that avoid disciplinary institutions while allowing space for the human and nonhuman to experiment and move together. . . . Animate Literacies is a work of refusal whose broad theorizing and engagement with classic works generates a politics of collective energies not to be foreclosed by anthropocentric logics and mandates." - Zachary Kinsella, Journal of Modern Literature