ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the plurality of stylistic, linguistic, and narrative tools that writers employ to express the plurality of animal behaviours, affects, and worlds. It purports to show that if writers and readers can be engaged in animals’ worlds, this is precisely because animals are not mere aloga, but they are also “figurative and rhetorical” beings: they display communication strategies, for example, leaving traces that “tell stories.” Perspectivism, metamorphosis, and hybridity are not simply literary or mythological themes and devices, but rather universal patterns and experiences shared by all living beings. Moreover, if we consider humans beings and their abilities, including language, in terms of co-evolution and symbiosis with other living beings, then anthropomorphism, far from leading necessarily to misconceptions and misrepresentations, might turn out to be productive both in scientific and literary studies. This is not to erase differences, but to acknowledge that all life forms are indeed in a relationship of dependence with an archè—an origin, a reason, a refuge, a dwelling, the Earth. Thus, Zoopoetics proves to be also a zoopoethics, insofar as it leads readers to stop looking at their habitat—their oikos—from above, as if they were not part and parcel of it.
