Title: Haunted by the specter of the animal other : reading beyond the human in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2022, vol. 48, iss. 2, pp. 137-157
Extent
137-157
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2022-2-7
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.77881
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This article offers a close literary analysis of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels through the theoretical rubric of Critical Animal Studies. I demonstrate how animals haunt the texts and how serious and respectful scholarly engagement with the specter of the animal other allows fresh insights and ways of thinking to emerge. As the analysis develops, I deploy the conceptual tools of Vegan Studies to suggest that meaningful multispecies relationships require us to devise radically innovative terminological, epistemological and ontological frameworks. The questions that arise when reading beyond the human in these novels create pathways that allow us to take some tentative steps towards a world that is more just for animals and more reflective of the "love" most people profess for the animals with whom they share their lives and homes. This article is an interrogation of literary representations and the assumptions that are embedded in those representations, a provocation to read beyond the human and a political plea for a more just world for all members of our societies. As a necessary first step, I argue that we must, at the very least, "see" the animal other when we read.
References
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[2] Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek (eds.) (1996) Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge.
[3] Atkinson, Kate (2004) Case Histories. London: Black Swan.
[4] Atkinson, Kate (2006) One Good Turn. London: Black Swan.
[5] Atkinson, Kate (2008) When Will There Be Good News. London: Black Swan.
[6] Atkinson, Kate (2010) Started Early, Took my Dog. London: Black Swan.
[7] Atkinson, Kate (2019) Big Sky. London: Black Swan.
[8] Birke, Lynda, Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke (2004) Animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/animal relationships. Feminist Theory, 5 (2), 167–183.
[9] Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[10] Dayan, Colin (2018) Personhood. In: Gruen, Lori (ed.) Critical Terms for Animal Studies.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 267–279.
[11] Deckha, Maneesha (2018) Postcolonial. In: Gruen, Loru (ed.) Critical Terms for Animal Studies.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 280–293.
[12] DeMello, Margo and Kenneth Shapiro (2010) The state of human-animal studies. Society & Animals, 18 (3), 307–318.
[13] Gruen, Lori (2015) Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern Books.
[14] Gruen, Lori (2018) Introduction. In: Gruen, Lori (ed.) Critical Terms for Animal Studies.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–14.
[15] Haifa Giraud, Eva (2019) What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press.
[16] Haifa Giraud, Eva (2021) Veganism: Politics, Practice, and Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
[17] Hamilton, C. Lou (2019) Veganism, Sex and Politics: Tales of Danger and Pleasure. Bristol: HammerOn Press.
[18] Hammington, Maurice (2017) Care, moral progress, and companion animals. In: Overall, Christine (ed.) Pets and People: The Ethics of our Relationships with Companion Animals.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 49–63.
[19] Haraway, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Other-ness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
[20] Ioannides, George (2013) Re-membering Sirius: animal death, rites of mourning, and the (material) cinema of spectrality. In: Johnston, Jay and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (eds.) Animal Death.Sydney: Sydney University Press, 103–118.
[21] Joy, Melanie (2010) Why we Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, the Belief System that Enables us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others: An Introduction to Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press.
[22] MacInnes, Cara and Gordon Hudson (2015) "It aint easy eating greens": evidence of bias toward vegetarians and vegans from both source and target. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 20 (6), 1–24.
[23] Matsuoka, Atsuko and John Sorenson (2018) Introduction. In: Matsuoka, Atsuko and John Sorenson (eds.) Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice.London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–18.
[24] McKay, Robert (2014) What kind of literary animal studies do we want or need? Modern Fiction Studies, 60 (3), 636–644.
[25] Milburn, Josh (2017) The animal lovers' paradox? on the ethics of "pet food". In: Overall, Christine (ed.) Pets and People: The Ethics of our Relationships with Companion Animals.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 187–202.
[26] Milligan, Tony (2017) The ethics of animal training. In: Overall, Christine (ed.) Pets and People: The Ethics of our Relationships with Companion Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 203–217.
[27] Oliver, Catherine (2022) Veganism, Archives, and Animals: Geographies of a Multispecies World. London: Routledge.
[28] Overall, Christine (2017) Introduction. In: Overall, Christine (ed.) Pets and People: The Ethics of our Relationships with Companion Animals.Oxford: Oxford University Press, xvii–xxv.
[29] Parry. Catherine (2017) Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
[30] Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona (2018) Anthropocentrism. In: Gruen, Lori (ed.) Critical Terms for Animal Studies.Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 47–63.
[31] Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona (2018) Crazy cat lady. In: Gruen, Lori and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (eds.) Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness.New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 175–186.
[32] Quinn, Emelia and Benjamin Westwood (eds.) (2018) Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory. Oxford: Palgrave.
[33] Ratmoko, David (2006) On Spectrality: Fantasies of Redemption in the Western Canon. New York: Peter Lang.
[34] Safran Foer, Jonathan (2009) Eating Animals: Should We Stop? London: Penguin.
[35] Sans, Pierre and Pierre Combris (2015) World meat consumption patterns: an overview of the last fifty years (1961–2011). Meat Science, 109, 106–111.
[36] Siebel, Pat (2015) Specters of nature; or, from metaphor to murder: the nonhuman-animal in Rash's Serena. Bridges: A Journal of Student Research, 9 (9), 1–6.
[37] Singer, Hayley (2018) Erupt the silence. In: Gruen, Lori and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (eds.) Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 65–76.
[38] Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies. Instructions for Authors. Available at https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_products/Author_Instructions/SOAN.pdf. (Accessed on 3 May 2022).
[39] Taylor, Nic and Richard Twine (eds.) (2014) The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre. London: Routledge.
[40] Wolfe, Cary (2009) Human, all too human: animal studies and the humanities. PMLA, 124 (2), 564–75.
[41] Wylie, Dan (2018) Death and Compassion: The Elephant in Southern African Literature. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.