On Method in Animal Studies

W hat is the "animal" of literary animal studies?What are the affordances of and challenges for a mode of reading premised on the claim that its objects of research represent beings who are subjects of a life?Three recently published journal articles compel us to consider these questions as problems of method.Through their attention to terminology, historiography, and metonymy, the essays link the figure of the animal with its real historical referent-a connection between the metaphorical and the material, abstract and concrete-in ways that illuminate and interrupt the workings of anthroponormativity.1 Taken together, the articles reclaim the animal sign from its various historical objectifications as mechanical instrument, divinely bestowed free gift, and stimuli-responding organism.But to do so, they tell us, means pushing up against the very limits of literary criticism's capacities for redescription, analysis, and interpretation.All three essays are therefore symptomatic of a tendency in the posthumanities toward self-effacement: the critic's confession of methodological difficulty, even inadequacy, compounds the field's wider interrogation of that thing that called "the human."At the heart of Jessica Murray's "Using Critical Animal Studies to Read Climate Change Fiction: Literary Reflections and Provocations," for example, is the declaration that "terminological options start failing me when I attempt to talk about Bones."2Bones is a cat from A. E. Copenhaver's 2022 novel My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, an animal who lives and eventually dies in the care of a protagonist who is critical of not just pet ownership but also the welfarist salve of adoption.If the novel determines that both "pet" and "adopted" are insufficient categories, then what sort of "conceptual repertoire," Murray asks, might the critic adopt to remain faithful to the text's representation of human-cat relations?3"Companion animal" has become the field's go-to formulation, but Murray distrusts this term for its insinuation of a relationship free of hierarchy.What's left, then, is simply the proper name, Bones, and Murray attends to how Copenhaver uses this cat figure to plot different valences of care.Murray's combination of close reading and critical confession is part of a broader plan: to uncover the "areas of elision that compromise the quality and integrity of contemporary literary and scholarly responses to climate change."4Curiously, though, the essay offers no examples of such compromised scholarship, focusing en gl ish lan g u a ge n o t es