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An Enfolding And Fertile Abyss: Rhetoric As The Creative Becoming Of Biological Life, Haylee Renee Zertuche

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This dissertation seeks traces of enfolding corporeal paths within the ontological, epistemological, ethical abyss separating "Human" and "Animal." The "question of the animal," as it is often called, is currently en vogue within a larger ecological movement in the humanities. I seek to extend this engagement with "animality" beyond rhetoric, literature, and philosophy by enfolding the sciences and arts as well for a deeper understanding of humans as animals and therefore, I argue, as rhetorical life. This path of the HumAnimal emerges with a diffractive reading of new material feminism, evolutionary biology, contemporary art practices, and visual rhetorics, and in …