Every theory has its pet names. What does Animal Studies think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Literature is written by humans, for humans. We might even argue that it is one of the things that is essential about our humanity—to be human is to tell stories, to engage in narratives. All cultures have literature in some shape or form.
Yet at the same it is not just all about us. Literary works engage with all kinds of nonhuman things—landscapes, ecosystems, and of course, animals. From Beowulf to comic books (as you'll find in our Key Texts section) the literary world is literally crawling with critters.
For animal studies, the interplay of these human and nonhuman forces is exciting and needs to be taken seriously. Literature isn't just about us—it's about our interactions with all of these other beings and it can really give us insight into how these other beings live and what their relation to language, myth and storytelling is.
What is an author?
First things first—all authors are animals. Animal studies begins and ends by reminding us that human beings are animals. Jane Austen. Herman Melville. Amy Tan. Toni Morrison. Every single one of these authors is an animal. The novels, poetry, and plays they write are like so many "animal noises."
So an author is an animal writing about other animals—including both human and nonhuman animals. Writers and other language users leave "traces" of things, according to deconstruction theorist Jacques Derrida.
Traces are like animal tracks, but in language. In these tracks we can see elements of our animality, sometimes repressed, sometimes made explicit. Authors are human animals and in their texts they leave marks of their humanity and their animality.
What is a reader?
Readers are similar to authors—they are animals reading about other animals, human and nonhuman. Animal studies scholars tend to be interested in readers for the ways that they respond to the depiction of animals in culture.
For instance, the fictional author Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals is interested in the ways that readers respond to animals in a Ted Hughes poem, or to descriptions of animals undergoing abuse. To be curious about these responses is to be curious about human empathy.
Do we, as readers, care or not about what happens to animals? Are we affected by literary language to engage with animals? In the case of a novel like Moby-Dick, with its chapters on the technical details of whaling, readers better be engaged and fascinated by human-animal interactions… especially because there are so many pages devoted to the specifics of whaling in that brilliant book.