In Search of the Nonhuman Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber The Dolphin’s Song Man is a fool as a rule but we must humour him in school. So far he only plays with hoops but we suspect he talks and every time he looks at us we blow our tops and surface laughing ‒ really we must try to communicate before it is too late with the silly suicidal but engaging skate. (Edwin Morgan) ‘Sometimes it takes a non-human to say what it is to be a good human’. ( Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit) Introduction: Can the nonhuman speak? Perhaps one should think about this collection as what in Germany we would call a Schildbürgerstreich, an absurd undertaking, riddled with self-contradiction from the start and doomed to failure. By what logic could one even begin to look for nonhuman perspectives in any production of human culture? Is the nonhuman not by definition assigned to the referential position of object of representation, never the representing subject? Are not all attempts to imagina‐ tively reach out beyond human perspectives projections of an impossible desire? If we presume to ‘give a voice’ to the nonhuman, are we irredeemably anthro‐ pomorphising and appropriating its alterity? After all, as Karla Armbruster DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 1 Without mentioning the term ‘performativity’ explicitly, Armbruster emphasises the contingency of any such ascription: “what we think of as discrete entities”, she claims, “do not enter into relationships with each other but are produced by relations” (2012: 12; original emphases). reminds us, the “practice of speaking for others, even when undertaken with the best of intentions, carries a real danger of misrepresentation and, in particular, of erasing difference, of turning the other into the same” (2012: 6). If it is a commonplace to stress even the difficulty of communicating phenomenological experiences of reality between individual humans (do I see the same shade of red as you do? ), surely to enter into the different perceptual experience of another species or entity is an utter impossibility. Any attempt to do so in human forms of cultural representation, based as they inevitably are on human language or human visual perception, must be doubly doomed. Human cultural endeavour necessarily implies an anthropocentric position and, in view of such inevitability, to represent and do justice to nonhuman perspectives can only be a vain endeavour. They are nowhere to be found. This, however, is only one way of approaching the subject. From another point of view, instead of being absent, nonhuman perspectives are in fact overwhelmingly ubiquitous; we are constantly surrounded and enveloped by them and still they remain problematically undifferentiated. On the one hand, ‘nonhuman’ here functions as an unmanageably amorphous signifier, dizzyingly broad in its negativity. It encompasses and assimilates the bulk of the known universe only to forestall any particular perspectivity within it. In face of the vast multiplicity of what could possibly be meant by ‘nonhuman’, the human itself threatens to dwindle into insignificance. On the other hand, since as Erica Fudge puts it “‘human’ is a category only meaningful in difference” (2002: 10), it is impossible to talk about the human without implying the nonhuman. Instead of constituting an ontological category, ‘human’ is, from this perspective, a per‐ formative term, in that it sets up its fundamental conviction (anthropocentrism) as the theoretical ground zero of its analysis (human-nonhuman relationality). 1 After all, what is human is always, necessarily, defined and constituted by that which it excludes. This, however, could also imply that our human perception, and ordering, of the world is not quite as unassailable as conventional wisdom might make it out to be. Already Francis Bacon, back in the early seventeenth century, suspected that “the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 8 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber 2 In The Open: Man and Animal (2004), Giorgio Agamben has described this nexus of epistemological and ontological distinction as the workings of the ‘anthropological machine’, a system which designates, in Mario Ortiz Robles’ words, “the discursive apparatus that both installs and polices the ontological difference Western thought posits between human and non-human” and “whose function is not the blurring of categorical difference but its affirmation” (2016: 14, 146). receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (qt. in Fudge 2000: 5). 2 This is most obviously the case in the fraught and shifting distinction between human and animal, which has been so extensively discussed and critiqued in the context of animal studies. To speak about the human is necessarily to discursively construct a generalised animal other whose alterity continuously encroaches on the boundaries of the signifier. But even beyond the human-animal relation, what is human is inevitably circumscribed by the nonhuman. Human existence cannot be extricated from the entanglement of material and organic ecologies which both sustain and threaten (human) life and culture. This speaks to one central paradox of this our Anthropocene: the very moment at which humankind is undoubtedly the dominant force in terms of impacting on the earth’s biological, climatological and geological development is accompanied by a growing awareness that there is no human perspective which would not be circumscribed and conditioned by nonhuman factors. Finally, the distinction between human and nonhuman threatens to utterly collapse when we let Donna Haraway remind us that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body” (2008: 3). Even the human is, to all intents and purposes, nonhuman. Cary Wolfe makes a similar point from a less clearly scientific position when he claims that “there is no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical, and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else”, meaning ultimately that “the ‘human’, we now know, is not now, and never was, itself ” (2003: 1, 9). From both positions, that of anthropocentric essentialism or posthuman deconstruction, the central concern of this collection must appear doomed from the start, as either the nonhuman or the human (or both) prove utterly elusive. And yet. Cultural productions constantly imaginatively engage with nonhuman perspectives by explicitly negotiating their alterity and relation to human perspectives, and they have done so for as long as we have any cultural record. In literature in particular, nonhuman speakers and focalisers are far from uncommon. Though narratology has sometimes labelled them as DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 9 “unnatural” (Alber 2016) or “strange” (Zunshine 2008), literary history teems with things, animals, plants, super-, subor posthuman entities which have the ability and power to speak, act and think on their own. Indeed, they even dominate certain genres (most obviously, fables and children’s literature). Such nonhuman perspectives can take many forms and pursue various aims. As allegories or fables they may satirise and criticise human society, in children’s literature they may serve to entertain or simplify plots, add an element of adventure, or provide a sense of safety by creating emotional distance between the story and the child’s reality. There is also a long tradition, reaching back to medieval literature and beyond, of animal and object speakers in riddles, typically using a first-person voice asking “what am I”? In such a context, nonhuman voices challenge and amuse, but may also be seen to “alienate the audience from the familiar human perspectives and align us instead with the animal, vegetable, mineral, meteorological (and sometimes even the man-made) Other”, as Erin Sebo has argued (2018: 50). In another genre distinctly devoted to nonhuman perspectives, the novel of circulation, which came to popularity in the eighteenth century, speaking objects helped to make sense of the commodity logic of rising capitalism and served as picaresque narrators whose nonhuman nature allowed them to easily transgress rigid human class boundaries, but also to pass moral judgement on human folly (Bellamy 1998: 119-128). Didactic literature employs animal and object speakers to make their objects vivid, simple and appealing. More recently, nonhuman perspectives proliferate in fantasy and science fiction, often adding to the thrill of the unfamiliar and mysterious, and they can be found increasingly beyond literature in film and in video games. Rather than being surprising, or strange, in some genres nonhuman speakers are what we may reasonably expect. As has often been noted, such ostensibly nonhuman perspectives are, more often than not, anthropomorphic to the point of entirely erasing any specifically nonhuman characteristics of behaviour and commonly invite a reading as allegory, metaphor or satire, a thin veil for decidedly anthropocentric concerns (Norris 1985: 17; Ortiz Robles 2016: 147; Baker 2019: 5). Thus the effect of nonhuman perspectives, it would seem, by and large depends on the degree in which they are anthropomorphic and familiar, or set out to be strange, uncanny or surprising. In view of such at times contradictory affordances, Lars Bernaerts et al. have called nonhuman narration “protean” and argue that its versatility is a result of what they call a “double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization (on the one hand), human and non-human experientiality (on the other)” (2014: 89; original emphasis). Nonhuman perspectives may in one instance feature as the epitome of coziness and in the next be utterly disturbing. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 10 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber And yet even in their most anthropomorphic form, nonhuman perspectives always carry with them at least the possibility to decentre a human point of view. While the strong appeal of nonhuman perspectives long predates more current concerns with rethinking human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene, these latter have come to dominate the critical debate, as recent years have seen increasing interest in imagining the nonhuman as nonhuman. At the same time, the growing ecological awareness and the broader challenges of Anthropocene thinking change current perspectives on earlier texts. Thus the just-mentioned double dialectic comes into play, in part, through the perspective of the reader. Take, for instance, Edwin Morgan’s dolphin in the poem which serves as an epigraph to this introduction. Of course, the poem’s humour works by flipping the positions of human and animal, thus deliberately anthropomorphising the dolphin and animalising the man. The poem presents a paradox by establishing the verbal communication between dolphin and man whose possibility it explicitly denies, or rather acknowledges only as a future project. This project, however, is assigned an urgency derived very much from a decidedly present perspective: “we must try to communicate / before it is too late” (ll. 9-10), the dolphin asserts, because man is “suicidal” (l. 12), and potentially dangerous for the environment they share. Clearly the object of this poem is not an earnest attempt to enter into the thought processes and perceptions of an actual dolphin, and one might argue that it trivialises the animal suffering involved specifically in dolphin shows as well as humankind’s imminent threat to their common lived-in environment in more general terms. It is firmly anthropocentric in the way its self-deprecating humour is necessarily directed at the human. Nonetheless, the defamiliarisation and reversal of the dolphin’s perspective - how it ‘mistakes’ its human ‘keepers’ as merely “play[ing] with hoops” (l. 4) - serves to question the conventional understanding of the relation and power dynamic between dolphin and human and to highlight the incongruity of human treatment of dolphins (and other animals). Yet surely, Morgan’s poem is likely to speak more readily and more urgently to readers today than when it was first published in 1970, before even the publication of the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth. Surely, the dolphin’s characterisation of man as “suicidal” resonates differently with an audience more mindful of the anthropogenic destruction of the environment, and its admonition that it might soon be too late rings more ominously in our later ears. While it is still funny, the laughter the poem provokes is perhaps more likely to stick in our throats. If anthropocentrism is indeed performative to a degree, then it can also be subverted and purposefully misread. Such (mis)readings in turn might help to overcome, or at least contest the “conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 11 separate the human from the nonhuman—variously conceived as animals, plants, organisms, climatic systems, technologies, or ecosystems” (Grusin 2015: x). It is the critics, as much as the texts, who need to make the imaginative leap into a broad variety of nonhuman perspectives and, by doing so, seek “to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which, you, too, participate” (Bennett 2010: 116). In that sense, too, Wolfe is right to insist that “the place of literature is radically reframed in a larger universe of communication, response, and exchange, which now includes manifold other species” (2009: 571). As emerges from the contributions collected in this volume, whether nonhuman perspectives have the capacity to challenge us depends not least on our own willingness, as readers and critics, to admit their alterity. Of posthuman and nonhuman perspectives The various approaches to nonhuman perspectives this volume brings together converge in such a willingness to admit and recover alterity. Not all of them are concerned with nonhuman speakers, though. The nonhuman perspective the contributions assume, perhaps paradoxically, is first and foremost the perspective of the human critic, prepared to centre nonhuman elements in their objects of study, be it in the form of the agency of microbes, the design of a gameworld or the wind that blows through lines of Romantic poetry. While, in most cases, such readings are placed within a distinctly posthuman framework, this volume can also be seen to partake of what Richard Grusin has termed “the nonhuman turn”, a tendency that is “engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies” (2015: vii). In its emphasis “that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman”, this nonhuman turn differs from its near namesake and contemporary ‘posthuman turn’, which, in Grusin’s view, entails “a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman, after or beyond the human” (ix). This is further propelled, no doubt, by the breakneck speed with which artificial intelligence encroaches on both our everyday routines and realities, which means that “the binary distinction between meaning (human world) and non-meaning (digital systems) is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain” (Bajohr 2024: 48). This has given new fuel to visions of postand transhuman end time, and therefore it is hardly surprising that the discourse about the eventual outcome of this posthuman decentring, or even abdication, of human DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 12 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber 3 MacCormack suggest that the “negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins” (2020: 8). Nonetheless, in a move which might strike one as paradoxical, she, too, gives her manifesto an ethical charge as she goes on to invite her (human) readers to “form new terrains of apprehension of the world and encourage new ethical relations between entities” (14). sovereignty is commonly conducted along positively eschatological lines. In one view, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism are identified as the root causes of all that is wrong with the world today, from species loss to climate catastrophe and the relentless exploitation of ‘natural resources’: Francesca Ferrando, for example, decries anthropocentrism as “a physical and mental dis-ease which is harming us all, as a planet” and celebrates how posthumanism “de-universalizes the human gaze, making it (species-)specific, bringing awareness to historical habits and onto-epistemological premises based on anthropocentric supremacy” (2023: 25, 4). In one of the most radical positions, Patricia MacCormack (2020) even celebrates visions of human extinction as a liberation of the planet. 3 While some, such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, are plagued by visions of a “textpocalypse”, which drowns any meaningful human expression and communication in a maelstrom of artificially generated slop (2024: 328), others are sceptical of such posthuman discourse, seeing this as representative of a “Silicon Valley ideology [which] takes humanist impulses as its starting point, only to transform them into anti-humanist utopias. It begins with the improvement of the human and ends in its final—and inhumane— overcoming” (Nida-Rümelin and Weidenfeld 2022: 5). Our contributions are largely critical of such radical and generalised visions. Instead, they draw on a common set of theoretical touchstones (with Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Jacques Derrida prom‐ inently among them), which prompt the decentring of the human not primarily as an abdication of human agency or existence, but rather in terms of an ethical injunction. In this light, an attempt at recovering and representing nonhuman perspectives may not inevitably be doomed to fail but could turn into an urgent ethical obligation. Moreover, such an ethics, as Barad insists, is predicated on a fundamental revision of our understanding of reality. Barad’s “agential realism” is an “an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and non-human, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices” (2007: 26). “Intra-action” provides the key to this framework, since this term, “in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, […] recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action”. From DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 13 such entanglements, a Baradian term which resonates throughout this volume, “a lively new ontology emerges” (33). In a resounding phrase from Barad’s eponymous book, they challenge us to “meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming” (353) and thus fulfil a responsibility which “entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then” (394). Braidotti pushes such somewhat vague ethical implications of nonhuman perspectivity even further, into the realm of political action, when she radicalises the feminist rallying cry “the private is the political” in arguing that “[a]nimals, insects, plants, cells, bacteria, in fact the planet and the cosmos are turned into a political arena” (2021: 113). In their critical readings of texts, films and games, our contributions take up this ethical challenge. What emerges most strongly from the different kinds of engagements with the nonhuman discussed in this volume is an awareness, on the one hand, of the severe limitations of our human capacity to imagine the nonhuman, accompanied, on the other hand, by the recognition of its potential to challenge, to decentre, to rattle. The nonhuman serves here as a space of liminal playfulness which may open possibilities even as it never can (or perhaps even should) become truly nonor posthuman. The ethical questions posed by any decentring of the human, after all, necessarily remain human ones. Does it, then, make no difference what kind of nonhuman is at stake, whether animal, plant, superhuman or material? It does, but there is a surprising breadth of common ground. As the contributions collected here show, it is possible to square the conceptual circle of both allowing for the individuality of specific nonhuman perspectives (be they mermaids, foxes, urns or gusts of wind), while at the same time acknowledging a common posthumanist or more broadly ecocritical concern shared among them. The reactions to our undifferentiated call for nonhuman perspectives bear witness to the expansive range of perspectives encompassed within this term. They also attest to currents of critical convergence and main points of reference that underpin the field covered in this volume: various forms of posthuman thinking, new materialism, critical animal studies, critical plant studies, and (eco)feminism. It speaks to the pressures of the current moment that this shared critical interest privileges some nonhuman perspectives over others. Thus, most of our contributors focus on nonhuman nature, while supernatural or fantastic beings play a comparatively minor role (though a central one in the contributions by Handl and Anderson). Meanwhile, the question whether and to what degree human-created objects or entities can speak as nonhumans emerges as a problem rather than as an assumption (in contributions by Boxhammer, Zähringer and Dowthwaite). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 14 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber Robots, androids or AI are largely absent from these pages, and ghosts are only glimpsed occasionally. Rather than engaging with such borderline cases which cut across the human-nonhuman distinction, our contributors generally start from the unreserved alterity of the nonhuman, acknowledging at the same time that even the very act of assuming a nonhuman perspective might serve to challenge the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Ultimately, all our contributors turn to nonhuman perspectives for their capacity to challenge human exceptionalism, to take into account nonhuman agency, to interrogate the limits of human agency and to raise pressing questions about a responsible reshaping and reimagining of human-nonhuman relations. Forms of the nonhuman: The structure of this volume In the first section of our volume, “Nonhuman Worldmaking”, we set the scene by situating the human within a nonhuman world in rather general terms. Our contributors here give evidence of the broad framework, conceptual as well as analytical, in which nonhuman perspectivity can be brought to bear to contest and undermine anthropocentric thinking and traditions. Its range extends from medieval romances to late-nineteenth-century short stories and from Romantic urns to contemporary video games. Jochen Achilles’s article helpfully starts out by demarcating some important terminological boundaries which map the theoretical field within which the bulk of our contributions operate. He clarifies distinctions between anthropocentric transhuman and ecocentric postand ahuman conceptions in contemporary ecological theories and finds a precursor to current concerns in Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century short story “A White Heron” (1886). In his reading of the story he demonstrates that anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to the nature-culture dyad always represent discursively and historically differ‐ ent responses to cultural and social transformation. Against the unstoppable advance of industrial civilisation and informed by the civilisational crisis this involves, so Achilles argues, “A White Heron” celebrates the power of human relinquishment to the nonhuman. Turning not to nature, but to art, James Dowthwaite’s contribution revisits a revered classic of the English literary canon, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. He explores the human-nonhuman relationship that Keats sets up in relation to his famous “unravished bride of silence”, and asks what this relationship tells us about the identity between truth and beauty. In doing so, and provocatively bucking the trend of most of the other contributions to this volume, Dowthwaite makes the argument that the urn’s nonhuman perspective might actually abet DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 15 the recovery of a sense of the human, as the nonhuman object of the artwork can only speak through the creative license of the imaginative poet. With this claim, Dowthwaite reminds us forcibly not to lose sight of the always human nature of the cultural objects under consideration. Julia Boll’s contribution takes us back even further in history. Her analysis of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and David Lowery’s film adaptation (2021), focuses on the interplay of human and nonhuman agency in a mythic, war-torn landscape, where human presence is often reduced to mere traces or apparitions. By disrupting anthropocentric perspectives and foregrounding nonhuman agencies, Boll argues, the film reconfigures medieval motifs to address contemporary questions of agency, morality, and boundaries between human and animal worlds, emphasising the autonomy of nature and spectral forces. The landscapes which are in the focus of Xaver Boxhammer’s article are, likewise, torn and devastated. He examines the post-apocalyptic platforming adventure game Rain World (2017) as an example of nonhuman-oriented game design, in so far as it creates strange environments and systems indifferent to the individual player, with the aim of deconstructing notions of human exceptionalism. By means of its complex story, fragmented narrative discourse, procedural simulation and emergent creature behaviour, Boxhammer shows, Rain World subverts the conventional anthropocentric paradigm that players can demand total comprehension and mastery from the video games they play. The next section of this volume, “Gender and the Nonhuman”, acknowledges a cultural history in which women have long been situated at the margins of what is properly human. It thus shifts the focus towards a subject which has, arguably since the mythical stories around Pandora or Pygmalion but more specifically in the wake of Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, intersected particularly fruitfully with issues around human-nonhuman distinctions: gen‐ der and desire. Paul Fagan’s contribution neatly illustrates the interrelatedness of these different manifestations of nonhuman discourse. He undertakes an ecofeminist reading of Virginia Woolf’s influential 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, suggesting to understand Woolf ’s essay not so much as a precursor to but a turn in the ecofeminist essay tradition. He interprets the nonhuman perspectives in Woolf ’s essay - from the embodied subjectivity of a Manx cat to the imagined viewpoint of an extra-terrestrial alien - as ruptures that grant her narrator a queer, planetary and even apocalyptic vantage point on the gendered writing traditions she is tracing as well as productively resituating her considerations of women’s socio-economic oppression within the more-than-human world. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 16 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber The final two articles in this section both project their negotiation of nonhu‐ man perspectivity onto figures from the realm of myth. Laura Handl traces the functions of femme anger in two novels by Natalie Haynes, and Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which she labels as ‘monster’ narratives. The ‘monstrous’ female protagonists of both novels, Handl argues, reflect their subject position in relation to a heteropatriarchal social system, but do not identify as human. Thus extracting themselves from human (narrative as well as social) conventions, they emphasise the sociocultural functions of gendering emotions in the service of discriminatory politics of othering and silencing. Emily Anderson focuses on Monique Roffey’s 2020 novel The Mermaid of Black Conch to suggest that employing fantastic creatures such as mermaids can give rise to a re-evaluation of what it means to be human and what it means to be a human living in the Anthropocene. A magical realist setting, Anderson argues, in which such fantastic creatures as the mermaid can effortlessly exist within human ‘reality’ helps to explore the potential as well as the limitations of destabilising anthropocentric attitudes. Engaging with the mermaid’s super‐ natural presence and more-than-human perspective challenges binaries such as the animal vs. the human and the magical vs. the scientific, on which such assumptions frequently rest. Troubling the animal-human distinction in particular is the central concern of the next section, “Animal Perspectives”, which takes a closer look at what has historically been one of the principle scenes for negotiating nonhuman perspectivity: encounters between (speaking or anthropomorphic) animals and humans. Animality, as Tobias Menely argues, figures as “the ‘first’ symbol: the trope of the other within the same, of the exception to the rule, of the unbridgeable distance and uncanny proximity among the living” (2015: 5), and Kari Weil maintains that animals “are at the very origin of our systems of representation” (2012: 12). As our closest nonhuman other, the animal is both the most familiar nonhuman interlocutor and the one who challenges human exceptionalism most directly. Wolfgang Funk elaborates on this challenge by drawing on Derrida’s seminal essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, situating its argument in the broader field of animal studies. On this basis, he centres on the perspective of one particular animal, the fox, to investigate contemporary literary attempts by Jasper Fforde, Sarah Hall and George Saunders to address the role of the animal in this our paradoxically posthuman Anthropocene. In doing so, Funk examines how these fictional encounters emphasise the blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, the role language plays in this renegotiation as well as the human effect on the shared environment. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 17 The next contribution likewise engages with Derrida and a variety of animals addressing humankind, this time, however, in poetry. Irmtraud Huber deploys a range of poems from the eighteenth century to the present to explore poetry’s ability to engage with nonhuman perspectives. In spite of the anthropocentrism which such endeavours can easily be accused of, she argues, lyric brevity and, in particular, the indirection of lyric address productively invites an imaginative turning of the gaze in epiphanic moments of shared vulnerability. Raphael Zähringer investigates a similar dialectic of defamiliarisation and empathy. Examining the video game Stray for the potential of nonhuman perspectives in digital media to decentre the human, he demonstrates how the game enacts a form of free indirect affect that merges interpersonal and intra‐ personal relationality across species and ontologies. Stray blends familiarity and estrangement to challenge anthropocentric assumptions while at the same time embracing the affective and relational dynamics of its characters. Under the heading “Material Perspectives”, the final section of the volume engages with perspectives that are arguably harder to anthropomorphise than foxes, mice or stray cats, such as microbes, plants and the weather. It sets out to investigate how material forms “interact with each other and with the human dimension”, thus producing what Serenella Iovino calls “configurations of meanings and discourses that we can interpret as ‘stories’” (2015: 71). Even though anthropomorphism can be said to pose a central challenge and problem for literary engagements with animal perspectives, in her seminal study Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues for the need to “cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism - the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature - to counter the narcissism of human in charge of the world” (2010: xvi). A failure to acknowledge the “vitality of matter”, Bennett suggests, “prevent[s] us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (ix). There are no nonhuman speakers in this section; instead, the contributions show that foregrounding the nonhuman involves a change of perspective: “If matter is agentic, and endowed with meanings”, Iovino reminds us, “every material formation, from bodies to their contexts of living, is ‘telling’, and therefore can be the object of a critical investigation aimed at discovering its stories, its material and discursive interplays, its place in a world filled with expressive - or narrative - forces” (2015: 70; original emphasis). Taking their cue from such a call, our contributors in this section trace and assess various kinds of nonhuman agencies. Introducing a historical as well as contemporary perspective, Sina Schuh‐ maier’s contribution demonstrates how human existence is, and always has DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 18 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber been, inextricably entangled with microbial forms. The ‘microbial turn’ which she diagnoses, calls for a radical shift in perspective, toward a post-anthropo‐ centrism that acknowledges shared agencies, altered scales, transcorporeal exchanges and ecological interdependencies. Taking recourse to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), she argues that the human, in this account, becomes a participant in a contagious event that involves nonhuman matter, (human) corporeality, the city infrastructure, divine agency and discourse. Similarly linking aerial phenomena with a sense of (human) time and transi‐ toriness, Alexander Scherr next develops an account of British Romanticism’s close entanglements of cultural and natural climates. Focusing on the role of aerial nonhuman actors such as winds, clouds and breezes in Romantic poetry, he traces an emerging awareness of long-lasting changes to the earth’s atmosphere that were inaugurated by the onset of industrial pollution. He reads poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as embodying not only the spirit of their more immediate historical surroundings but also, on a larger geological scale, the air of the Anthropocene. Ending this section and our volume with a contemporary literary take on the interaction of humankind with its material environment, Sarah Wegener examines Lauren/ Wren James’s young adult cli-fi novel Green Rising (2021) as exemplary for imagining what she calls a zoe-centred network, constituted by a web of fungi which functions as a nonhuman neuronal network and displays forms of self-aware and independent organic intelligence. By enabling a form of (intra-)organic communication, Wegener argues, such ‘collaboration’ is apt to present the posthuman subject in its final stage of assemblage, even while the literary genre conventions of the text end up undermining to an extent its disruptive potential. 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