Palates Unbound: Anthropomorphic Animal Narrators and the Ethics of Taste in Contemporary Literature
摘要
In contemporary literary studies, the intersection of animal studies, posthumanism and food ethics offers new ways to interrogate the gustatory terrain beyond the human subject. This paper explores how anthropomorphic animal narrators when endowed with voice, agency and emotional depth, contest the hierarchies of taste and consumption that have historically privileged human palates while erasing the sentient other. Through close readings of Laline Paull’s The Bees, Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, and Sara Gruen’s Ape House, it examines how food becomes a site of ethical entanglement and narrative resistance across heterogeneous narrative and media ecologies. In The Bees, Flora 717’s caste-bound labour and gustatory sensorium expose how feeding, scarcity and sacramental ‘Queen’s Love’ enforce hierarchies of edibility and reproductive control. The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly portrays Sprout, a hen whose maternal devotion subverts reproductive and species boundaries. In Ape House, bonobos with emotional and linguistic intelligence reveal how feeding rituals are entangled with performance and surveillance. Drawing on Carol J. Adams’ ecofeminist discourse, Donna Haraway’s companion species theory, and Cary Wolfe’s posthumanist ethics, the study situates these narratives as participating in counter-discursive tendencies that begin to unsettle the binaries of human/animal and eater/eaten. It proposes taste as a visceral, affective and ideological construct, where consumption can become critique and empathy emerges as a tentative posthuman horizon rather than a fully realized imperative.