I was very conscious of the premium importance these three different pieces placed on narrative. In the Kynard, Flossie creates her own agency by spinning her own narrative for the Fox. In PAX, where the essential question is whether you…

Melson’s “Reaching Across the Divide” among other things, alludes to the ways in which animals (pets, to be more precise) get interpellated into normative, capitalist, heteropatriarchal ways of being. Critics such as michael Cobb have argued about the subversiveness underlying…

In part I think we can attribute (if not necessarily wave away without further examination) a lot of the leaps Melson’s argumentation seems to make to the stakes of Why the Wild Things Are – identifying connections between children and…

“What small child could resist sticking a twig down a burrow to unearth a field mouse, or picking up an injured bird for closer inspection?” (Melson) Is it? It is certain that in developing psychology, early children behavior is predominantly…

Carmen Kynard says “I see all of this now as a kind of black literacy skills-set, a black-girl skills-set even, a worthy one that I will always be honing.” “life and death matter”  Stories of/for survival are crucial for black…

On page 30, Melson says that we “can count on these animal companions to dispense affection, relieve childhood isolation, and give our offspring the quality time that we are too exhausted or distracted to provide”. Do we agree with this?…

I loved Flossie and the Fox and Kynard’s blog post about it. Kynard points out the difference in the opening lines from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘did i ever tell you about the time’. She posits that this makes…

Question: What exactly is kinship? Does it entail equality among parties? If not, what is the power dynamic?

-I’ve found Harde’s reading of the ambiguous status animals hold in Indigenous literature and oral histories interesting. If the relationship between animals and humans is not always perceived as benevolent—that animals offer themselves to humans—does this not challenge the ethics…

I know that Ruwanthi also asked along these same lines, but I’m really curious about the degree to which our inevitable centralization of a text, a literary object and a literary voice, challenges or troubles some of Harde’s own readings…