Posthuman(ist), Affective and Global Turns in Ecofiction and Ecocriticism: Philip Armstrong’s “Litter”

The essay provides a posthumanist reading of Philip Armstrong’s short story “Litter,” published in the volume Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction in 2014. A prologue to the main argumentation presents the whole collection as a sample of world literature, and the perspectives of world literature and posthumanism as the most relevant and promising in current literary studies. The interpretation of the short story tries to answer the question of how literature may contribute to the urgent needs of the ongoing crisis of the Anthropocene by emphasizing the efficacy of Armstrong’s use of the techniques of narrative empathy in staging a posthumanist approach to the animal question.