Animals and Agency ─ An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Literary criticism, ethics, anthropology, and primate psychology are among the disciplines that have contributed scholars to explore whether mute animals mean what they do. Their topics include affordances and acts of resistance by whales in captive environments, animated animals and 21st-century environmentalism, the ourang-outang in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," horseface minstrelsy in the western, competing voices representing the experimental animal in Victorian culture a discourse analysis of institutional animal care and use committee meeting, were-animals in Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate and Patrice Kindl's Owl in Love, and the micro-geography of infestation in relationship spaces. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sarah E. McFarland, PhD (2005) in English, University of Oregon, is assistant professor at Northwestern State University. Her publications examine how representations of animals are used to construct human conceptions of animal subjectivity, gender privilege, and contemporary environmental ethics.Ryan Hediger, PhD (2005) in English, University of Oregon, is visiting assistant professor at La Salle University. His research focuses on the rhetorical function of literary and cultural objects in 20th-century and contemporary America, with emphasis on animals, ethics, and environment.