Literature scholar Susan McHugh's new book examines animal stories
University of New England Associate Professor Susan McHugh encountered a problem while teaching George Orwell's Animal Farm: today's college students are far more likely to see the characters as animals, rather than as symbols of Soviet oppression.
While old-timers would dismiss these students as simply wrong, McHugh notes that doing so requires studiously ignoring Orwell's own explanations that his ideas about human as well as animal politics are at the heart of his novel.
With her new book Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, McHugh argues that the students' responses beg a much bigger question of literary history: what has changed so that people can read animals as having their own stories, as having history, in the broadest sense?
A faculty member in UNE's Department of English and Language Studies, McHugh offers the theory that such changes have as much to do with artistic and philosophical innovations as with scientific and technological innovations in the twentieth century.
Looking at the ways in which fictions of companion species - including guide dogs, racehorses, pets, and farm animals - mutate across the past hundred years, Animal Stories tracks the rise and persistence of such stories, aligning them with surprisingly disparate but all quintessentially modern developments, notably the rise of disability-activist and women's rights movements, the enclosure of animal slaughter from public view, and the establishment of the field study as a method of biological science.
By attending to the details of these complex historical and cultural contexts, McHugh shows how narrative and species forms have grown inseparably, and in ways that inspire new thinking about human-animal research across the disciplines.
Posthumanities Series
As the latest volume in the University of Minnesota Press' critically acclaimed Posthumanities series, Animal Stories also contributes to an emergent discussion among scholars of how this kind of work might help to reinvigorate the humanities from within the discipline of literary studies, if not lead to a more comprehensive reconfiguration of knowledge structures beyond the disciplines.
"By focusing my research on an era that many see as distinguished by the disappearance of animals amid seemingly endless proliferations of mass killings of all species, including our own," McHugh observes, "I cannot help but conclude that problems of this scale and immediacy require a variety of different archives of texts, methodological tools for interpreting them, and theories to question their relevance to lived relations."
In this way, she shows how questions about representing animals in literature come to concern the conceptual and practical futures of species, and potentially model better ways of reading, writing, and living within our own as much as alongside other species.
Susan McHugh
McHugh is also the author of Dog (2004), a literary and cultural history of humankind's best and perhaps oldest friend that is part of the award-winning Animal series published by Reaktion Books.
She has published articles in the leading peer-reviewed journals in her field, including Critical Inquiry, Literature and Medicine, and PMLA, and this spring she takes on a new role as managing editor of humanities for the interdisciplinary journal Society & Animals.
At UNE, she is chair of the Core Curriculum Committee of the College of Arts and Sciences as well as faculty advisor to Zephyr: UNE's Journal of Artistic Expression.