Academic literature on the topic 'Human-animal relationships, fiction'

The five-part short story ‘All the Animals’ imagines an array of animals who feature in the life of a fictional human family over many years. The story is inspired by qualitative research into human-animal relationships in families with children in Lisbon, Portugal. ‘All the Animals’ aims to offer a fictional ‘thick description’ of multispecies families in a particular time and place, but also to provide a reflection on the role of storytelling in human-animal entanglements.


 Christy Tidwell is an associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and she is one of the leaders of the ecomedia interest group at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Digital Strategies Coordinator at ASLE as well. Christy is the co-editor of the volumes Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington Books, 2018) and Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (Penn State UP, 2021) and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Extrapolation, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and Gothic Nature. She has also contributed to volumes such as Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (Palgrave, 2020), Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss (Lexington Books, 2020), and Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2016).

Abstract: This article examines Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and Ball Lightning using the framework of Liu’s essay “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature,” as well as the idea of the ecogothic, as outlined by William Hughes, Andrew Smith, David Del Principe, and Emily Carr. Liu discusses the idea that literature primarily focuses on human relationships. He then explains that the universe is vast, and in the 13.2 billion years of history, humans have only been present for a small percentage of that time. Because of this, he calls for literature to experiment with challenging anthropocentric thought. This article focuses on how Liu uses ecological horror, feelings of dislocation, disorientation, fragmentation, and the uncanny to challenge anthropocentric ideology. It relies on close reading and an examination of intertextuality, especially focusing on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed much about intrahuman relations, exposing a “politics of pandemic othering” through its exacerbation of pre-existing social and political tensions while unsettling previously accepted understandings of sickness, care, and communal obligation. Just as significantly, the pandemic has also underlined the complex connections that exist between humans and nonhumans—both in the context of human-virus relations, and in the broader context of anthropogenic devastation of the natural world. This paper presents an analysis of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013), as read alongside the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, as an “ecosickness” narrative that considers the impact of a human-induced viral apocalypse on human-nonhuman relations. In particular, the novel explores the possibility of developing more positive, meaningful relationships with more-than-human others in the wake of a viral pandemic. Utilizing Donna Haraway’s thoughts on “kin-making” and Heather Houser’s work on “ecosickness fiction,” I argue that the interconnectedness depicted between humans and nonhumans in MaddAddam represents the potential to develop what I term a “postpandemic kinship” in the COVID-19 era. I explore how the narrative of MaddAddam is generally positioned to explore this idea of human-nonhuman kinship and then discuss this further in relation to three key motifs that appear throughout the text: the nonhuman animal, refugia, and stories and storytellers.

The article carries out a comparative genre analysis of popular science articles about animals in the Soviet press of the 20th century, and in the Runet of the 21st century. The research is based on a model that includes the following items: animal; author and addressee; society (community of readers of the article about animals) and the state of literature; language. It is shown that the image of an animal in the article about animals is represented by a number of narrative plots: appearance; nutrition; intraspecific relationships; the birth of the young ones; attitude towards a human, which, being universal, reveal a certain dynamics in details. The image of the reader of the article about animals is also relevant: in the 20th century they were presented as a “simple Soviet person” (tendency for self-education, optimism), in the 21st century – a layman observert, in many ways reminiscent of a tourist: their attitude towards the described animals is characterized by superficial curiosity, a share of indifference, non-involvement, non-empathy, however, not excluding sentimentality. As for the dynamics of the article about animals as a speech genre, the most significant changes are the changes in the state of society / literature: “Soviet society ∼ capitalist society”, “pre-Internet literature ∼ Internet literature”. In particular, the Soviet manner of expression, which was restraint, optimistic and humanistic, is changing to permissiveness bordering on dissoluteness, pedaling “the bottom” and agonal plots. Among the linguistic means of expression in the articles about animals, the author focuses on the method of personification (the similarity of an animal to a human), which at all stages of the development of the article about animals is both a constant factor of the additional interest in the animal and a source of a number of productive models of metaphorization. The main sources of “humanizations”, specific images and precedent texts in the articles about animals are art, fiction, cinema, estrade, etc., in modern times – a new mythology created by “Hollywood-Disney”.

San Francisco, AK Press, 2007 Full Text You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. -Shevek, in The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin In a testament to his ability to draw on diverse authors and theories, Bob Torres opens the final chapter of Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights with a quote from a science fiction novel, and in so doing he successfully draws together many of the themes of his work. LeGuin's character Shevek hails from a society organized by property-less relationships, complete gender equality and communal living. Shevek travels to the capitalist planet Urras and finds a materially wealthy society plagued by repression, alienation and radical inequality. His revolutionary ideas are quickly shot down. For Torres, Shevek represents a social anarchist perspective that entails a daily commitment to living and embodying the principles that one wants to see practiced in the world. Far from beginning his academic career as an animal rights activist, Torres, assistant professor of sociology at St Lawrence University and co-host of the popular Vegan Freak Radio podcast, originally studied agricultural science. It was a "dairy production" class that initially led him to think more seriously about animal oppression, and the logistics of the commodification of sentient beings under capitalism. Torres was taught to view animals as producers. He learned how a farmer survives in the "go big or go home" world of agribusiness: by squeezing every last bit of production out of animals for the least possible input. Capitalism relies on alienation between "producers" (in this case, cows) and their "products" (their calves, their milk, and eventually, their own bodies), creating a mental distance between consumers and producers that obscures underlying power relations and exploitation. Torres' experiences with production agriculture disrupted this mental distance by revealing the process by which sentient beings become "living machines" for the profit and enjoyment of humans. Torres situates his analysis of animal exploitation and advocacy within broader discussions of Marxist political economy, social ecology, social anarchism, and abolitionist animal rights theory. He challenges all of his readers, regardless of their political inclinations and thoughts on the status of nonhuman animals, to make connections between different forms of oppression, and to examine the power relationships that underlie their attitudes and consumer choices. He implores the Left to consider animals within broader liberation struggles but reserves some of his most powerful critique for the "animal rights" movement itself. He chastises animal advocates who fail to work in solidarity with other anti-oppression movements and whose means are inconsistent with their desired ends. Torres maintains that if capitalism, commodification, and property relations are inextricably linked to animal exploitation, then working from within this paradigm is not a recipe for effective activism. According to Torres, the animal rights movement in its current incarnation as the "Animal Rights Industry" has lost sight of itself and its long-term goals and has been co-opted to the point where it can no longer target exploitation at its foundation. He argues that the movement has become dominated by multi-million dollar organizations with enormous operating budgets that work directly with agribusiness in pursuit of endless welfare reforms. He points to the ongoing "love affair" between animal protection organizations and corporations like Whole Foods, and argues that these alliances actually make animal exploitation more profitable. Despite all of the rhetoric about "compassion", corporations' primary responsibility is towards shareholders. For example, rather than encouraging concerned consumers to stop eating animal products, Whole Foods caters to a niche market willing to pay a premium for "happy meat". Drawing on the abolitionist animal rights theory of Gary Francione, Torres shows how this phenomenon actually perpetuates animal exploitation by reinforcing the idea that animals are property, thereby legitimating their commodification. As the (legal and conceptual) property of humans, animals' subjectivity, their interests in not suffering, and the fulfillment of their natural needs and behaviours all become secondary to the interests of property owners. For these reasons, welfare reforms and anti-cruelty laws inevitably fail to protect the interests of animals. Having argued that we cannot buy a revolution for animals by donating to our favourite animal protection corporation or by purchasing ever more "humane" animal products, Torres maintains that anyone can use their own strengths and talents to bring about social change - all that is needed is a commitment to making a change consistent with one's own principles. Torres empowers his readers to seek affinity with other social movements and to strive for fundamental societal change that strikes at the roots of all hierarchy and domination. Recognizing animal exploitation as a needless form of domination, Torres advocates veganism as a direct refusal to participate in the consumption, enslavement, and subjugation of animals for human ends. Veganism is a daily, lived expression of that ethical commitment, and it embodies the change that animal rights movement seeks to implement.

This paper examines posthumanism as a philosophical position equipped to inform ecocriticism and the potential of popular fiction to articulate ecological complexity. Posthumanism will be reappraised as a dialectical model that decentres the human in relation to ‘evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates’ (Wolfe 2010: xvi) while nevertheless retaining a sense of the integrity of, and boundaries between, human and nonhuman species or phenomena. It will be argued that a novelistic emphasis on human being, agency, and action, coupled with devices of genre, plot, and narrative – are consistent with the process of human self-examination engendered by posthumanism. The essay will, thereafter, illustrate and examine this approach through the French crime writer Fred Vargas’s1999 novel Seeking Whom He May Devour. Identifying two human protagonists – the Canadian conservationist Johnstone and his girlfriend Camille – an initial decentring of the human subject will be examined in relation to two equivalent, nonhuman protagonists, the French Alps and the wolf. Utilising newspaper interviews that highlight Vargas’s own posthumanist perspective (grounded in her profession as an archaeologist), I will examine a) how the novel explores appropriate relationships between human and nonhuman animals; b) how Vargas utilises both the generic features of the crime novel – e.g. the resolution of a ‘crime’ – and the subtle narrative manipulations of character focalisation to construct (via the preferred ‘point of view’ offered by Camille) a posthumanist position on human/animal relations which Vargas explicitly opposes to the inhumanism represented by Johnstone. Resumen Este artículo examina el posthumanismo como una posición filosófica dotada para contribuir con la ecocrítica y el potencial de la ficción popular para articular la complejidad ecológica. El posthumanismo será revaluado como un modelo dialéctico que descentra al ser humano en relación con “las coordinadas evolutivas, ecológicas o tecnológicas” (Wolfe, Posthumanism xvi), mientras que aún así retiene un sentido de la integridad de, y de las fronteras entre, las especies o fenómenos humanos y no-humanos. Se argumentará que un énfasis novelístico en el ser humano, la agencia y la acción, junto con los recursos del género, argumento y narración, son consistentes con el proceso del auto-examen engendrado por el posthumanismo. Después, este ensayo ilustratá y examinará este enfoque a través de la novela Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999), del escritor francés de novela policíaca Fred Vargas. Identificando a los dos protagonistas humanos, el conservacionista canadiense Johnstone y su novia Camille, el de-centramiento inicial del sujeto humano será examinado en relación a los dos protagonistas no-humanos equivalentes: los Alpes franceses y el lobo. Usando entrevistas en periódicos que destacan las perspectiva posthumanista de Vargas (basada en su profesión como arqueólogo), examinaré: a) cómo la novela explora las relaciones apropiadas entre animales humanos y no-humanos; b) cómo Vargas utiliza tanto las características genéricas de la novela policíaca (e.g. la resolución de un crimen) y las sutiles manipulaciones narrativas en la focalización de los personajes para construir (a través del favorecido “punto de vista” que ofrece Camille) una posición posthumanista en las relaciones humanas/animales que Vargas explícitamente opone al inhumanismo que Johnstone representa.

Elif Shafak's 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees describes fictional events that occur on the real island of Cyprus during the war between the Greek and the Turkish inhabitants of the island. This story is told from multiple points of view at various points in time in both Cyprus and London, where the characters move to and live following the events of the war and their families’ disagreements with their relationship. What is unique about Shafak's storytelling is her use of a fig tree as a primary narrator of events. While the use of non-human narrators is not a new strategy, most of these occurrences involve animal speakers rather than plants or objects. In delivering a fiction narrative from the point of view of a fig tree, Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees introduces readers to multispecies encounters by providing an example of how arboreal figures communicate and experience history alongside humans in an anthropocentric world, and further encourages prosocial behavior between human and non-human species. Based on Shafak's novel, theories of attentiveness and slow-violence, and studies on the effect of non-human narrators on readers, including these "non-living" narrators in widely accessible pieces of fiction not only informs audiences of the multispecies encounters that occur in everyday life, but also opens more avenues of multispecies conservation.

Abstract The study draws on scholars (Leech and Short 1981; Wales 1994; Fowler 1996; Ball 1997; Semino 2002; Leech and McIntyre 2006) who focused on the ‘point of view’ in dramatic texts as a concept which permits an authoritative voice to enter the narrative and arise in discourse. It intends to examine how im/politeness contributes to renegotiating some special themes in fiction like, for instance, how the human-animal relationship is to be portrayed in two Greek translations (1995, 2015) of Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story (1958). The claim is that translators’ ideological positioning regulates pragmatic aspects of meaning-making like the use of aggression and intimacy in reshaping the identity of characters and entities in the translated versions. Τhe study traces how the two translators attributed aggression to humans/animals in the universe of The Zoo Story by taking into account lay people’s evaluation of the two translations. Results show that TTa (by Kaiti Chistodoulou 1995) uses im/politeness strategies which indicate lower esteem for animals and higher esteem for humans. By contrast, TTb (by Errikos Belies) shapes a different identity of the human-animal relationship: it indicates higher esteem for animals, doing justice to the zoo imagery. The findings suggest that the narratives that permeate discourse crucially affect the use of im/politeness of the fictional interactants and that im/politeness is a powerful tool in the hands of translators. Im/politeness research may also benefit from translational data in that they can provide multiple contexts in which im/politeness can be studied in interaction cross-culturally.