This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

What would you do if you were diagnosed with terminal cancer? Or, what are you doing right now if you have it already? Or, what are you thinking if you know someone facing it, or you are currently caring for them? Are you fighting it? Do you have a positive attitude? Or, to the contrary, are you accepting it: acknowledging that you cannot win so you might as well not resist? Are these the only choices? Your answers probably depend upon age, and circumstance, and where you are from. What do you think are the right narratives or metaphors to help you explain what looks like the end of life, for however long it might last? Some people run marathons or race for the cure. Some people write books. Terry Tempest Williams has written two memoirs about the illness and death of her mother Diane at the age of fifty-four. Williams continues to look to the natural world, to birds in particular, in order to try to come to terms with loss and life at its end. From the publication of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in 1991 to When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice in 2012, Williams has inhabited the metaphor of women as birds and nature as a guide to both life and death. These two memoirs are, for me, both inspiring and infuriating.

My wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-one. We chose to engage with chemotherapy as far as it would go. When she died, less than six months later, our daughter was only nine months old. I, too, have tried to come to terms, if not blows, with terminal cancer. I have run marathons and written a book, although it is not a memoir. I am drawn to Williams's writing, to her advocacy, to her passion for speaking out, for her willingness to keep on resisting when it comes to working for environmental protection and an end to human suffering on a global scale, while the U.S. government continues to wage war on “terror.”

Hvordan sier du “animality studies” på norsk? How do you say “animality studies” in Norwegian? How would you translate it? How about “animal studies”? I pose these questions to my graduate students at the University of Oslo, as an American trying to learn Norwegian, without knowing what the best translations or neologisms might be. But what am I asking? What does “animality studies” or “animal studies” mean in English? How do we explain what these fields are to English speakers as well as students and scholars around the world? How is animality studies different from animal studies, or critical animal studies, or human-animal studies, or humanimal studies, or species studies, or posthumanism? And what does it all have to do with literary and cultural studies? The chapters in this volume help to explore potential answers to these questions, but they are not necessarily focused on explicit distinctions or definitions of these terms. To be bold, then, in an attempt to clarify what we are doing in these perhaps murky waters, I want to call for a change. I think we can distinguish more clearly between the various projects that have often been lumped together under the umbrella of animal studies. But “animal studies” strikes me as the least productive possibility out of all of these terms, if only because it has come to include such a wide range of work that can often be at odds with (if not explicitly opposed to) each other. I propose dropping the use of “animal studies.” If “the” animal is over, following Derrida – if some of us believe that it no longer makes sense to lump together all nonhuman animals in a singular opposition to “the human” – then we might be able to think further about the end of the animal and the end of animal studies. To what ends do we engage these various projects? How do literary and cultural studies in particular move beyond the human?

I think it will help to identify what I call “animalities” as objects of study that can be approached in three primary ways.