Livestock and Literature : Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species

This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals’ commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine ‘what if’ scenarios where “livestock” practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers’ understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page. Acknowledgments Contents Abbreviations Chapter 1: Introduction: Animal Industry, Literature, and Imagining the Future 1.1 Imagining Alternative Worlds for Postanimal Livestock 1.2 Scope and Outline of Livestock and Literature Works Cited Chapter 2: Accessing the Forms and Functions of Farmed Animal Narratives 2.1 De-/Industrializing the Imagination to Recognize “Carnocene” Protagonists 2.2 (Farm-)Animalizing Narrative Theory in Cultural and Literary Animal Studies Readings 2.3 New Materialist Thinking to Activate Farmed Animal Representations Retraining with Material-Semiotic Farmed Animal Agents Toward a Narrative Ethology: Can Narratives Make Us Care About Livestock? 2.4 Narrating and Studying Narratives About Herds, Commodities, and Meat Affective Reader Engagement Through Vegan Readings Anthropomorphic Animal Representation on a Continuum Narrating Collective Animal Agency Farmed Animal Narrators and Focalizers 2.5 Barnyard Rebels in Many (Dis)Guises: Pigs, In/Edibility, and Literature at the Turn of the Centuries From Animal Forms to Allegories in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) From Human Source onto Animal Figures in Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995) From Animal Source onto Human Figures in Don LePan’s Animals (2009) Works Cited Chapter 3: (Re-)Imagining Farmed Animal Characters in and Through Science and Speculative Fiction 3.1 Relationships Between Humans and Livestock in Twenty-First-Century Meat Culture Domestication, Biopolitics, Reciprocity: Making Kin with Farmed Animals Biotechnology, Capitalization, Bioethics: Modifying (Post-)Livestock Characters 3.2 Cyborgs, Companion Species, and Postanimal Figures Suspending a Prescribed Anthropological Difference in Zones of Indistinction A Self-reflective, Postanimalist Lens for Literary Animal Studies 3.3 Four Key Affordances of Sf in Narrating Livestock Meeting Douglas Adams’s Self-butchering Cow (1980) and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Sheep (1968) Encountering Alien-Like Animals from Planet Earth in Laura Jean McKay (2020) and Deb Olin Unferth (2020) Works Cited Chapter 4: Eating Well in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013): Biotech Farmed Animals and a Hopeful Model of Multispecies Futurity 4.1 “It’s Easier for Them to Talk to Us”: Negotiating Postanimal Terms at a Multispecies Dining Table 4.2 Challenging Human Supremacy: Unstable Focalization and Becoming Prey in Oryx and Crake (2003) 4.3 Attuning to Multispecies Relationality: Alienating Close-ups and Distanced Observation in The Year of the Flood (2009) 4.4 “You Are Not the Friend of Those Who Turn You into a Smelly Bone”: Reconfiguring Dining Table Constellations in MaddAddam (2013) 4.5 Retraining a Multispecies Imagination Works Cited Chapter 5: “I am sitting in a kitchen, talking to a sheep”: Looking Through Postanimal Eyes in Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014) 5.1 Misrecognizing Human-Animal Boundaries in a Postanimalist Playing on Bêtise 5.2 Becoming a Long Pig: Problematic Uplift of Animal-Technology-Human-Hybrids 5.3 “And Say the Animal Responded”: Deromanticizing Human-Animal Bonds in a Post-Meat Culture 5.4 (Mis-)Recognizing a Bleating Lamb: Breaching Human-Animal Distinction in the Narrative Portrayal of a Postanimal Agent 5.5 Connected Within a Spidery Mesh: Biotechnology and Animal Ethics in a Postanimalist Thought Experiment Works Cited Chapter 6: Beyond the Cages: Possibilities and Limitations of Reimagining Livestock in Literature 6.1 Lessons to Draw from the Poetic Potencies Designed in Literary Thought Experiments 6.2 The Animal Industry, the Anthropological Machine, and the Work of Metaphors 6.3 Sharing Planets, Sharing Lives: An Outlook on Future Research and Human-Animal Relationships Works Cited Works Cited Index