Elizabeth Hoiem (hoiem@uiuc.edu) is an English graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches fantasy and British literature. She is writing her dissertation on autonomy and mechanism in British education theory, 1760-1860. This project occasionally clashes with reading speculative fiction, but the two fields find common ground in her love of quirky mechanical gadgets. Her other writing includes an article in Tolkien Studies, Volume 2. To the right, she is seen with her cat Pippin.
Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.