Seven Types of Animality, Or: Lessons from Reading and Teaching Animal Fictions

This essay delves into the diversity of animal stories in human meaning ecologies and argues that the ‘lessons’ to be derived from these stories revolve around the meaning and effect of various forms of ambiguity. Following the route of a selection of mostly Irish canonical texts, from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist, it formulates seven lessons for reading and teaching animal fictions in a multispecies world. It argues that we must cultivate a sense of ‘ciferal’ reading that does not resolve but thrives productively on the tensions and ambiguities of human-animal relations that literary fiction excels in putting into words.