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WOLFE, CARY. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 252 pp. $18.00.
Novels serve as a record not only of human life but also of the contexts within which concepts of the human along with other animals evolve. Yet it is only recently that literary critics have begun to address how and why these nonhuman and multispecies worlds enter fiction. This largely untapped literary archive is in part what spurs the development of animal studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry focused on the discourse of species, but it also begs the question, why has it taken literary scholars so long to take animals seriously? Put simply, why animals? and why now?
With Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Gary Wolfe offers bold answers to these questions by not only developing how modern and postmodern philosophical discussions of animality open up new concerns in narrative interpretation but also unearthing the disciplinary roots of resistance to questions about animals. Wolfe contends that critical practices that fail to uncouple the discourse of species from the institution of "speciesism"-the systematic discrimination against others based on the generic characteristic of nonhuman status that fuels a fundamental repression of concerns about human species identity-perpetuate even as they purport to break with humanist epistemologies. Moreover, through these practices literary and cultural critics set themselves at odds with both science and popular sentiment in the contemporary U.S., where emerging scientific models of subjectivity as extending beyond human bodies inform the rapid proliferation of animal films and fictions.
Especially through examples that include readings of canonical modernist fiction and contemporary thrillers, Wolfe shows how literary criticism can break this cycle by begining to trace the discourse of species outside the speciesist framework. For a properly postmodern pluralist attention to specificity, materiality, and most importantly multiplicity reveals that "the 'human,' is not now, and never was, itself (9), that is, a biologically or culturally discrete platform of identity, but rather the product of discursive operations. Starting...