Animality and Textuality 2021 : A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, Special issue Animality and Textuality

In the current state of the increasingly institutionalised field of Animal Studies, the same opaqueness that was held against both animality and writing has been defended as a productive nexus in which to think about animals and their relationship to text. For example, Anat Pick’s concept of the creaturely, characterised by its focus on embodiment, has proved influential in conceptualising both animal and human being. Thus, what had been a tool of oppression against animality – bodiliness – ironically becomes, in a process of reversal, a rallying point for animal liberation and for animal-centric literary criticism. This reversal can be diagnosed as a contributing factor to a certain “counter-linguistic turn” that, in literary studies, critical theory, and philosophy, has seen a turn towards concepts of life, affect, matter, bodies, nature, and the sciences.

Nevertheless, many authors have resisted this anti-textual turn, even when they grapple with the same issues. Sarah Boutier, for example, argues that texts themselves can be thought as creaturely as well, since their referentiality is marked by their “being embodied and finite at the same time”. This focus on textuality as something inherently animal has also been suggested by Susan McHugh, and Kári Driscoll, among others. Christopher Peterson and Claire Colebrook have also articulated a defence of ‘textualist’ approaches for posthumanist projects against some critics’ facile denunciations.

Set in the context of this methodological debate concerning the animal, this issue will look into the relevance of textuality for Animal Studies. Taking into account both a reappraisal of the traditional linguistic turn for the sake of “creaturely texts” and a retooling of current innovations in posthumanist scholarship for textual purposes, the issue will enquire into the tension between body and text as it pertains to literary scholarship concerning animality. Within the larger scope of posthumanist thought and scholarship, have ‘textual’ approaches proved obsolete by dint of the their excessively ‘humanist’ impulses? Or have refutations of post-structuralism been too reductive in their understanding of the text and its supposed others, such as the animal and matter?