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

Author(s)

  • Jopi Nyman Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9955

Abstract

This essay examines Susan Richards’s memoir Chosen by a Horse: How a Broken Horse Fixed a Broken Heart (2006) by focusing on its affective representation of the human-horse relationship. The discussion shows how the story of the mare Lay Me Down in Richard’s work is intricately linked with the narrator’s changing identity. It contends that this relationship, represented in the text by the use of a discourse of healing and self-regeneration, seeks to reconstruct the traumatized autobiographical subject and negotiate her identity. The close bond with between the narrator and the ailing horse shows that the two participants are involved in a joint process of identity transformation, described by Donna Haraway (2008) as becoming with another species. The essay will also suggest that the affective representation of the horse and its significance to the self-transformation of the traumatized autobiographical narrator is also part of the therapeutic discourse of contemporary American culture.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

  • Jopi Nyman

    Professor Jopi Nyman is Head of English at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus. He is the author and editor of several books in the field of Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies, and his most recent book is the co-edited volume Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2014). His current recent interests include human-animal studies and narratives of border and transculturation. This essay represents work carried under the auspices of the research project Companion Animals and the Affective Turn: Reconstructing the Human-Horse Relationship in Modern Culture funded by the Academy of Finland.

Downloads

Published

2014-02-02

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

“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”. 2014. Humanimalia 5 (2): 68-86. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9955.