At The Top Of The Hierarchical Ladder

In contemporary Western societies, human-animals are so firmly embedded in speciesist anthropocentric biases that establish as nonhuman animals or others, they are incapable of imagining that have the capacity for far more agency than they themselves will ever wield. In their Magic Realist novels Blood and Chocolate (1997) and Owl in Love (1994), two Young Adult authors, Annette Curtis Klause and Patrice Kindl respectively, posit that human-animals lack the agency (thus, the ability, power, and intelligence) to sit a top the evolutionary ladder; this rung is occupied by were-animals. These authors question and subvert representations of human-animals and through a dissolution of boundaries constructed by anthropocentric belief systems. Klause and Kindl attempt to situate readers in the affective experience of animal through their creation of kinship between human-animals and were-animals.Keywords: Annette Curtis Klause; anthropocentric belief systems; Blood and Chocolate; human-animals; Owl in Love; Patrice Kindl

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Anthropocentrism · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Kinship · Motif (music) · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis