ABSTRACT
Becoming literate has been thought of as entailing domestication of a kind since acculturating children by way of didactic texts suggests a clear analogy with the taming of wild animality. In this chapter, we are interested in texts where speech with animals is both modelled and brought into question because of ambivalent humanimal identities. The texts include Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and Jimmy Kennedy’s ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ (1932). The position of the adult or child reader/listener in this text – like that of the foreigner in a new culture – is one we might see as foreshadowed by Lewis Carroll’s Alice, in her experience of the wood where things have no names. Through reading, we evolve understandings of our human relationships with other humans and with other-than-human others, with the animate world and with the inanimate: with creatures, with things that grow, and with all the other things.
