Horse as Significant Other: Discourses of Affect and Therapy in Susan Richards’s Chosen by a Horse: How a Broken Horse Fixed a Broken Heart

Introduction. The transformation of the animal from the Other of Cartesian modernity to a central actor in late modern culture has been registered in recent literary and cultural studies, such as Huggan and Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment and Philip Armstrong’s What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Literary texts, as Armstrong claims, have for a long while reflected on the relationship between “the animal” and its various counterparts, including “humanity” and “culture” (1). When mapping out the development of the literary representation of animals at various points in the history of modernity, Armstrong emphasizes its diversity that runs counter to traditional juxtapositions: while Swift’s eighteenthcentury satires call for “sympathetic identification between human and animal” (48), contemporary postmodernist writing often critiques western industrialism and science, which have caused the destruction of wild and unspoilt nature (170). The widely-held opposition between the humans and the animals has been questioned by other critics as well. While Huggan and Tiffin discuss texts problematizing widely-held views of agency and sexuality as solely human characteristics (see 190–201), Susan McHugh emphasizes the interconnectedness of the various species and suggests that non-human animals do not function “as supplements to human subjects” but it is “as actors” that they contribute to the “shaping” of humans (3). Life narratives, as I will argue, are a site for exploring such relationality.