Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing

Animal Visionsconsiders how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Bront�'sWuthering Heights(1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthuman dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker's poem "Obsession" (1992) and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (1997) most strongly extend Bront�'s dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush's music video "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and Peter Kosminsky's filmWuthering Heights(1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart's novelChanging Heaven(1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath's poem, "Wuthering Heights" (1961). Bront�'sWuthering Heightsand its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold's filmWuthering Heights(2011) and Luis Bu�uel's Abismos de Pasi�n (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled animal responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.