Book Review, "Animals Among Us" (Ashland Creek Press, 2014). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines
Humanimalia, 2012
On the cover of Susan McHugh's book, the subtitle "Narrating across Species Lines" bisects the title "Animal Stories" at a forty-five degree angle. This cover image astutely captures the general thrust of this work of criticism, which provides a number of new angles on literary and visual narratives featuring nonhuman animals-narratives ranging from genre fiction (Baynard Kendrick's mystery novels featuring a blind war veteran who works as a private investigator with his guide dog) to classic literature (George Orwell's Animal Farm) to film (Babe) to photography (Sue Coe's Dead Meat).
Animal Studies Journal Alexis Wright' s Literary Testimony to Intersecting Traumas
This article proffers a reading of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), hailed as ‘the first truly planetary novel’ (Gleeson-White), arguing that Wright’s poetics of transgenerational trauma witnesses to intersected trans-species injustices and traumas. Exploring the way Wright testifies to entanglements of human-nonhuman trauma, I challenge entrenched humanist and speciesist preoccupations in trauma theory to address trauma transmissions with a particular focus on trauma as a social and political force generated by patriarchal imperialism. In doing so, I show how Wright’s fiction serves as a form of advocacy for nonhuman sentient beings.
Anglistik, 2019
Stories of humans and their companion animals have fascinated the reading public for centuries. While in the 20th century most such stories implicitly served to reinforce anthropocentric structures and humanist philosophies, this paper argues that British companion animal stories of the 21st century often narrate distinctively different stories that set out a posthuman, rather than a humanist agenda. Instead of ever-loyal dogs and plucky cats, the animal protagonists the reader encounters frequently are uncanny ones: secretly talking genetically modified creatures, family pets with (often distinctively dark) agendas of their own, cats with transformative powers or dogs whose apparently innocent actions turn out to be inspired by ideologies the human characters cannot fathom. Uncanny companion animal characters such as Prince, the dog hero of Matt Haig’s The Last Family in England (2004), or Roger, the supernatural cat of Lynn Truss’s horror satire Cat out of Hell (2014) are precariously posed on the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, and often – through the intervention of genetic engineering and bio-technology – nature and technology as well. Such companion animal stories frequently transgress boundaries: not only do the pets forcefully undermine the animal-human border and negate any form of dualist self/other or nature/culture distinction; companion animal narratives also blur genre distinctions. The intellect, and often language, of the uncanny pet introduces fantastic elements into what at a first glance appear to be realistic worlds, and as talking animals in particular most commonly inhabit children’s literature, but in 21st century stories frequently appear in adult fiction as well, target groups too remain tantalizingly undefined. In its literary conspecies and other pets, Derrida’s cat has been joined by a multitude of other voices of the non-human that, as I will argue, inhabit a posthuman narrative spaces and urge for a redefinition not only of the human / companion animal relationship, but of the very idea of ‘humanness’.
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
Jodey Castricano frames her fascinating edited anthology, Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, as an intervention into cultural studies, or more precisely, a challenge to cultural studies scholars. "Simply put," she reflects, "the aim of this collection is to include the non-human animal question as part of the ethical purview of cultural studies" (7). Specifically, the text attempts to demonstrate the relevance of the question to a field that has conventionally critiqued the human subject, centrally interrogating the ways in which the traditionally unmarked category is, in fact, particularly constructed through power-laden gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed discourses. The text illuminates the limits of cultural studies which, despite its scholarly and political impact, nonetheless reproduces a politics of exclusion in regard to non-human animals. Such disavowal helps reproduce an essential border against which "the human" of the humanist tradition can be sustained. As Cary Wolfe notes (2003),