Accessing the Forms and Functions of Farmed Animal Narratives

In view of the increased sophistication of the animal industry, Western cultural imaginaries around human-animal relationships are dominated by narratives of violence, exploitation, and a lack of alternatives. This chapter introduces an approach to reading and studying farmed animal narratives that seeks to unravel what a “deindustrializing the imagination” could entail. Grounded in cultural theoretical debates that call for disengaging Western imaginations from deterministic patterns to learn how to imagine future forms of life (Berardi 2017, 235; Bieri 2011, 12), the metaphor serves to describe the cultural and ethical work literature performs in connection to reading “farmed animal narratives.” At its core, the chapter provides theoretical groundwork on the co-constitutive relationships between textual and living animals: with the help of Derridean animal theory and new materialist thinking, animal representations and the texts in which they appear can be conceived as entangled within material-semiotic processes of meaning-making. The chapter applies core concepts and frequently applied heuristic tools in narratological animal readings to the study of farmed animal representations and discusses the capacity of literature to inspire care for nonhuman animals critically. Selective readings of pig narratives published between the twentieth- and the early twenty-first centuries illustrate how the critical analysis of allegories, anthropomorphization, narrative empathy, nonhuman narration, and focalization sheds light on how animal representation engages readers’ imaginative capacities. Moreover, they point to the necessity to imagine alternative worlds for “livestock” in science and speculative fiction to outthink narratives of violence and exploitation.