The Place of Human Language in the Animal World

Thomas More is often called a “humanist,” and rightly so if the word has its usual meaning in scholarship on the Renaissance. “Humanist” has by now acquired so many different and contradictory meanings, however, that it needs to be applied carefully to the likes of More. Many postmodernists tend to use the word, pejoratively, to mean someone who believes in an autonomous self, the stability of words, reason, and the possibility of determinable meanings. Without quite arguing that More was a postmodernist avant la lettre, this essay suggests that he was not a “humanist” who stalks the pages of much recent postmodernist theory and that in fact even while remaining a devout Catholic and sensible lawyer he was quite as aware as any recent critic of the slipperiness of human selves and human language. It is time that literary critics tightened up their definition of “humanist,” especially when writing about the Renaissance.

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Quenched: Five Fires for Thinking Extinction

Oxford Literary Review ◽

10.3366/olr.2019.0262 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 41 (1) ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Jemma Deer

Keyword(s):

Human Language ◽

The Past ◽

Ipcc Report ◽

The Future

By the light or remains of five fires, this paper considers how the current extinction crisis might be thought in relation to the future and the past, to speed and acceleration, to ir/reversibility, and to the evolution of human language and consciousness. The thought of extinction as the extinction of thought is elaborated through engagement with J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Jacques Derrida's ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ and ‘White Mythology’, and the October 2018 IPCC report. The paper concludes by speculating upon an answer to the following questions: if we know that there will be an end to thought, what will have been the end of thought? To what end do we think at all?

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