Animals and agency : an interdisciplinary exploration / / edited by Sarah E. McFarland Ryan Hediger.

• Superior document: Human animal studies, v. 8
• TeilnehmendeR: McFarland, Sarah E.; Hediger, Ryan.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Human-animal studies ; v. 8.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (392 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

While many scholars who write about animals deal with animal agency in some way, this volume is the first to position the question of nonhuman agency as the primary focus of inquiry. Section I presents studies of actual animals demonstrating agency; Section II moves agency into new terrain while considering key representations of animal agency in literature; Section III analyzes animals as mediators and as conveyances of human-to-human communication;and Section IV investigates the agency of beings who defy conventional species categories. The Envoi demonstrates how the microscopic polyp is interwoven into notions of agency and mythical superagency. This volume's interdisciplinary explorations press hard on issues of agency to open up space for more questions about how we can understand relationships between the human and the nonhuman.

Table of Contents

Approaching the agency of other animals : an introduction / Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger -- Animals as agents -- Whale agency : affordances and acts of resistance in captive environments / Traci Warkentin -- The racehorse as protagonist : agency, independence, and improvisation / Shelly R. Scott -- Consuming Timothy Treadwell : redefining nonhuman agency in light of Herzog's Grizzly man / David Lulka -- Dancing penguins and a pretentious raccoon : animated animals and 21st century environmentalism / Sarah E. McFarland -- Speaking through animals -- No human hand : the ourang-outang in Poe's "The murders in the Rue Morgue" / Stephanie Rowe -- Sled dogs of the American North : on masculinity, whiteness, and human freedom / Rebecca Onion -- The slave whisperer rides the frontier : horseface minstrelsy in the western / J.J. Clark -- Speaking for animals -- Representing the experimental animal : competing voices in victorian culture / Jed Mayer -- Forms of life : the search for the simian self in ape language experiments / Rebecca Bishop -- Animals, agency, and absence : a discourse analysis of institutional animal care and use committee meetings / Debra Durham and Debra Merskin -- Humanimals and other marginal species -- "To abandon the colonial animal" : "race," animals, and the feral child in Kipling's Mowgli stories / Dipika Nath -- At the top of the hierarchical ladder : were-animals in Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and chocolate and Patrice Kindl's Owl in love / Cat Yampell -- The microgeography of infestation in relationship spaces / Matthew Candelaria -- Crossing over : (dis)ability, contingent agency, and death in the marginal genre work of Temple Grandin and Jim Harrison / Ryan Hediger -- Envoi towards a philosophy of the polyp / Laurence Simmons.