Abstract

Reading Go Down, Moses through the lens of recent work in animal studies demonstrates not only Faulkner’s environmental ethics but, more specifically, the ways in which his fictional representations of animal life resist appropriation by human systems of instrumental use and abuse. Faulkner’s narrative strategy, I argue, foregrounds how nonhuman and human animals are subject to violence once they are named “animal” and underscores how the animal as an abstract concept fails to critically or ethically account for the diverse lives of actual animals. At the level of Faulkner’s own prose, animals erupt from their confinement within language and narrative to call attention to the often reductive and violent gestures of human discourse.

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