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Article published In:
Voicing Absences/Presences in a Damaged World
Edited by Jessica Maufort and Marc Maufort
[English Text Construction 15:2] 2022
► pp. 118–137

Animals squawking their mysteries

Narrative, poetic form, and the nonhuman in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country

ORCID logo | Ghent University
Scholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) as a powerful example of how the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”
Keywords: ecological crisis, ethics, speculative fiction, trans-species communication, pandemic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Body
  • 3.Voice
  • 4.Form
  • 5.Ethics
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00053.car
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