Author: Kavita Singh

Abstract: Literary depiction of animals can disrupt anthropocentric conceptions of identity through foreshadowing non-human agency and experience. This paper contends that in Flush: A Biography, Life of Pi, and “A Report to an Academy”, Virginia Woolf, Yann Martel, and Franz Kafka portray animal characters as not symbolic but as performers who inhabit the world cohesively through sense and emotion. Based on posthumanist criticisms of human exceptionalism (Agamben, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari), affect theory (Massumi), Umwelt theory (von Uexkull), and relational/multispecies thinking (Haraway, Kohn), this work illustrates the reorganization of agency and subjectivity by these narratives. The paper is mainly divided into three sections. In the first part, it represents that in Flush, the canine narrator of Woolf maps an olfactory world of sensuous sensibility (“the smell of Wimpole Street meant to Flush”) that is beyond the understanding of human beings. This stresses an alternate sense of perception concerning non-human animals. Next, the primal fear and survival instincts experienced by Richard Parker in Life of Pi. Here, he embodies primal fear (“without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today”), which demonstrates affective co-dependence. And in the third section, it foregrounds that the story “A Report to an Academy,” written by Kafka, depicts the way Red Peter was turned into a performing human. This captures the concept that “identity is performance…It is not a static essence, a given, but a constantly reenacted self-representation” (Sokel 283). All these selected texts imply identity as a process of co-construction in which non-human animals practice agency through action and feeling, which forces humans to reconsider the boundary.

Keywords: Human-Animal Studies, Posthumanism, Exceptionalism, Affect Theory, Umwelt, Non-Human Animal Agency, Performance, Identity, Multispecies, Woolf, Martel, Kafka.

Article Info: Received: 19 Nov 2025; Received in revised form: 21 Dec 2025; Accepted: 25 Dec 2025; Available online: 31 Dec 2025

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.66.55