Abstract
In engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species lines, creators of animal autobiographies also broach questions about genre, truth status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation. To address these questions, the present article draws not just on scholarship on (animal) autobiography but also on ideas from the fields of linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis, including the “framing and footing” approach that focuses on talk emerging in contexts of face-to-face interaction and that derives most directly from the work of Erving Goffman. On the basis of this research, and using case studies that range from animal riddles to Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), a collection of life stories posthumously narrated by a variety of nonhuman tellers, I profile autobiographical acts that reach beyond the human as ways of speaking for or in behalf of animal others. Some animal autobiographies correlate with acts of telling for which humans themselves remain the principals as well as authors; their animal animators remain relegated to the role of commenting on human institutions, values, practices, and artifacts. Other examples, however, can be read as co-authored acts of narrating in behalf of equally hybrid (or “humanimal”) principals. These experiments with narration beyond the human afford solidarity-building projections of other creatures’ ways of being-in-the-world—projections that enable a reassessment, in turn, of forms of human being.
Highlights
In animal autobiography, a nonhuman teller provides an account of situations and events in which he or she has, over the course of the life history leading up to the current moment of narration, participated as an experiencing self
Questions that have crystallized around the study of self-narratives1 told by human selves apply mutatis mutandis to animal autobiographies, where a kind of doubled or layered relationality is at work: that between the human author of the narrative and the nonhuman agent whom the author projects as telling it, and that between the animal narrator and the range of others, human as well as nonhuman, to whom the animal teller, in
In engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species lines, creators of animal autobiographies broach questions about genre, truth status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation—in this case, the practice of narrativizing the experiences of subjects who communicate via resources that extend beyond human language systems
Summary
A nonhuman teller provides an account of situations and events in which he or she has, over the course of the life history leading up to the current moment of narration, participated as an experiencing self. 63–102), these earlier experiences at once shape and are shaped by the assumptions, values, and priorities that, it can be inferred, lie at the heart of the nonhuman narrator’s self-conception, and that manifest themselves through the substance of the story that the animal tells and through the teller’s manner of narrating [3] In such contexts, questions that have crystallized around the study of self-narratives told by human selves apply mutatis mutandis to animal autobiographies, where a kind of doubled or layered relationality is at work: that between the human author of the narrative and the nonhuman agent whom the author projects as telling it, and that between the animal narrator and the range of others, human as well as nonhuman, to whom the animal teller, in. Along the same lines, using case studies that range from animal riddles to Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014) [10], a collection of life stories posthumously narrated by a variety of nonhuman tellers, I profile autobiographical acts that reach beyond the human as ways of speaking for or in behalf of animal others, situating such acts within their broader sociointeractional and institutional—as well as narratological—contexts
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