Jemma Deer, "Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Nov 16, 2025

Jemma Deer, a researcher at the Rachel Carson Center, dives into her book, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World. She challenges human-centric perspectives, urging us to see literature as a tool for environmental engagement. Deer elaborates on how texts, from Shakespeare to Woolf, reveal insights about our relationship with the non-human. She also discusses 'Anthropocene reading' and the transformative potential of language, suggesting that embracing animism can reshape our understanding of existence in a climate-changed world.

45:44

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ANECDOTE

PhD Hiatus Sparked By Climate Concern

Jemma Deer paused her PhD because climate anxiety made literary work feel pointless.
She returned and revised her research to combine literature with environmental concerns.

insights

INSIGHT

Animism Reframed For The Anthropocene

Animism names agency beyond humans and treats inanimate forces as meaningful.
Deer argues this view becomes logical in the Anthropocene as boundaries between living and nonliving blur.

insights

INSIGHT

Climate Change As Fourth Blow

Climate change acts as a fourth blow to human narcissism, following Copernicus, Darwin, and psychoanalysis.
Deer says we both know and ignore these blows, and the Anthropocene materializes their consequences.

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Deer's background and how literature met environmental concern

02:01 • 2min

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Defining animism and the Anthropocene's challenge to human centrality

04:27 • 5min

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What role can literature play in responding to the Anthropocene?

09:07 • 4min

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Why study etymology and Derrida's influence on animistic reading?

13:02 • 5min

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How does the notion of 'text' extend in the Anthropocene?

What is 'Anthropocene reading' and its three senses?

23:28 • 2min

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How do Virginia Woolf's novels enact decentering and rescaling?

25:38 • 5min

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How do Alice in Wonderland and animal objectification relate to the Darwinian chapter?

30:30 • 6min

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How does Hamlet relate to Freud and the limits of human agency?

36:32 • 4min

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Is 'Reading for the End of the World' hopeful or apocalyptic?

40:19 • 2min

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What are Deer's current projects on extinction and fungi?

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Radical Animism

Reading for the End of the World

Rachel "Big Spinach" Lance

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Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) invites the reader to take a moment and to ponder on the way of reading. In her book, the author challenges the narcissistic position of the human being: a status that has been established for some time and which has already been challenged before but does not seem to be changing quickly. The Anthropocene reveals the dangers which are connected to the human centrality and power; on the other hand, it requires new ways of engaging with the environment. These new ways are not limited to the gestures of consideration in relation to the profound changes that led to climate change in particular. They ask for a new mode of thinking when the inanimate is part and parcel of the human being. In this regard, Jemma Deer draws attention to reading and writing as ways and modes of engaging with the inanimate and with the environment that serves as a habitat for the acts of reading and writing. The book offers strategies for reading literary texts across cultures and times: the works by Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf reveal new echoes in the context of the Anthropocene. Radical Animism is a gentle invitation to abandon human superiority and to explore the ways that subvert a conventional hierarchy of the human and the non-human.

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