Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Anthropomorphism through Ceridwen Dovey’s *Only the Animals* (2014)

In Ceridwen Doveyâ s short story cycle, Only the Animals, inter-textual allusions to established fictional animals are imposed onto settings of human conflict and ventriloquised through diverse animal subjects. This paper defends narrating from a non-human animal perspective, not as a radical act, but as a move to reinvigorate our conceptions of human-animal relations. Meaningful encounters between human and non-human animals are presented with a recognition of the impossibility of full and mutual inter-species understanding. The juxtaposition of the limits of figuring literary animals with human/animal intimacy and incomprehension marks Doveyâ s work as a logical progression of some ideas presented in J. M. Coetzeeâ s Elizabeth Costello. This paper reads Doveyâ s deployment of textual self-referentiality and overt intersection with Coetzeeâ s work in Only the Animals as a reflexive writing form that works to critique another representational dispossession: that of anthropocentric realism. Both works understand that humans do not share language with non-human animals but we often meet questions of the animal through stories. This makes the stories we tell highly significant; indeed â vital â components of the cultural landscape

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Art · Biology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Human animal · Impossibility · Livestock · Perspective (graphical · Realism · Reflexive pronoun · Sociology · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Philosophy

• As Closely Bonded as We are

  Grace Moore•a/b Auto/Biography Studies•2020

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