4 research outputs found
Microbial Zoopoetics in Octavia Butlerâs Clayâs Ark
This paper reads Octavia Butlerâs 1984 novel Clayâs Ark as a speculative handbook for living collaboratively in a more-than-human world. Drawing on Aaron Moeâs theory of zoopoetics, as well as emerging research on the effects of the human microbiome on health, behavior, and personality, I consider how the novelâs âvillain,â an infectious microbe, might be not just a germ but an author, writing difference into the text of the human species. Depicting this interspecies relationship as both troubling and productive, Butler suggests the urgent need for humans to construct responsible and mutually beneficial forms of collaboration with their nonhuman neighbors of all sorts
Finding Ferality in the Anthropocene: Marie Darrieussecqâs âMy Mother Told Me Monsters Do Not Existâ
What will it take to undomesticate the worldâto begin to loosen humanityâs tight grasp on the planetâs spaces, structures, resources, and populations? Marie Darrieussecqâs short story âMy Mother Told Me Monsters Do Not Existâ describes the intrusion of an unidentifiable creature into a fastidious womanâs apartment home, a modest but powerful scene of undomestication. This brief tale illustrates the intertwined forces of domestication and feralization that link humans and animals and proposes interspecies companionship as a lively and productive site of ferality in the regimented unwildness of the Anthropocene
The Speculative Agency of the Nonhuman: Animal, Object, and Posthuman Worldings
This dissertation explores representations of nonhuman agency across the diverse literary tradition of speculative fiction. I identify speculative fiction as a site where cultural discourses of personhood, species, and power might be challenged and reworked; a loosely defined genre, SF insists on an openness to disruption, exploiting the creative and politically radical possibilities of imagining the world otherwise. The project draws upon an archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, English, and U.S. American texts that adopt a speculative mode in order to literalize long-standing associations of the feminine, animal, and object in the Western patriarchal imagination, populating their pages with figures of feminized cyborgs, animalized women, and mechanized animals. By worlding a range of beings defined by their difference from the human norm, the texts intervene in longstanding anthropocentric discourses of âwhoâ versus âwhat,â proposing a more inclusive notion of personhood that recognizes collective, interdependent, and passive forms of agency. I draw upon feminist theory, gender and queer theory, animal studies, and posthumanist scholarship to articulate an intersectional approach to multispecies ethics.The four chapters separate into two parts, each concerned with one vector of the infinitely multiple field of the nonhuman. The first two focus on artificial, machinic life as one alternative to human species-being; Rachildeâs Monsieur VĂ©nus in Chapter 1 and Villiersâs LâEve future and Carterâs The Passion of New Eve in Chapter 2 employ cyborg figures to challenge dominant discourses of gender propriety and authorial agency. The second two chapters focus on animals and animality as a second alternative to humanity; Carterâs Nights at the Circus and Darrieussecqâs Truismes in Chapter 3 and Stapledonâs Sirius and Bakisâs Lives of the Monster Dogs in Chapter 4 attend to the perils and pleasures of bestial life on the margins of human-dominated society. Together, the chapters build toward a notion of worlding as collaborationâbetween humans, animals, and machines; between genders; between storytellers and stories, authors and texts