The Animal Who Writes

Writing begins with unconscious feelings of something that insistently demands to be responded to, acted upon, or elaborated into a new entity. Writers make things that matter--treaties, new species, software, and letters to the editor--as they interact with other humans of all kinds. As they write, they also continually remake themselves. In The Animal Who Writes, Marilyn M. Cooper considers writing as a social practice and as an embodied behavior that is particularly important to human animals. Cooper argues that writing is an act of composing enmeshed in nature-cultures and is homologous with technology as a mode of making.

Marilyn M. Cooper is emerita professor of humanities at Michigan Technological University.