Stories told by non-human narrators have been around for almost as long as humans have been telling stories. Gods, spirits, animals, trees, and a variety of inanimate objects have been given a voice and a platform to tell of their exploits in myths, legends, fables, folktales, children’s stories, and the so-called it-narratives. In contemporary world literature, however, this familiar and venerated literary device stands out as an anomaly. To the extent that it deliberately goes against realist conventions, non-human narration should have been given pride of place in unnatural narratology—a branch of narratology that theorizes narrative practices that break mimetic illusion or present physically or logically impossible scenarios (Jan Alber, Brian Richardson et al.). But this has not been the case. It is possible that this neglect stems from the prejudiced impression that non-human narration is the preserve of children’s literature and thus an aesthetic compromise with immature minds. The texts considered in this panel, drawn primarily from East and South Asia, prove this view wholly mistaken.

This panel showcases the latest efforts at using cognitive science tools to account for the appeal of stories told in the voices of animals, trees, rivers, AI, and other “things.” What happens to embodied cognition when there are no (human) bodies to speak of? How do authors navigate the imperatives of capturing an alien ontology/umwelt and retaining allegorical recognition/human interest? If cognitive narratology is grounded in the study of real human minds and their storytelling inventions, how useful can it be in making sense of the inner worlds of entities whose minds are highly opaque or are not supposed to have a mind in the first place?

In “Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators,” Lars Bernaerts et al. argue that fictional narratives told from non-human perspectives effect a “double dialectic” of empathy and defamiliarization, human and non-human experientiality. The goal ultimately is to reflect on and challenge aspects of the human. The papers on this panel extend this foundational insight to consider how non-human narration from Asian world literature troubles the boundaries of the real, the plausible, and the knowable. The broader goal of the panel is to contribute to the “ontological turn” in the human sciences following Phillippe Descola et al.’s upending of the nature-culture and mind-body dualisms. Collectively, the panelists show that animism is not limited to traditional or Indigenous modes of dwelling in the world. Non-human narratives have always kept alive a profound appreciation for embodiment, distributed agency, and the essential aliveness of everything that makes living on this planet possible.

Elika Assumi’s paper revisits Khasi oral traditions in northeast India through the double lens of cognitive narratology and folklore studies. She argues that animistic narratives told in the voices of rivers, animals, and elemental spirits challenge Eurocentric cognitive models centered on human perception and rationality. In Miyazawa Kenji’s short story about a pig who acquires literacy, once it apprehends its edible fate, it chooses not to speak and communicate only in onomatopoeias. Animal silence and incomprehensibility, as Miyabi Goto contends in her paper, become a protest against the human-centric system of signification and human sovereignty. Nicoletta Pesaro examines Can Xue’s experimentation with biocentric narration. Drawing on eco-narratology, Pesaro asks what it means to partake of a willow tree’s cosmic contemplation in which human figures are relegated to the objectified periphery, and what is unnatural about a narrative emanating from a natural being with the most elemental connection with life.

While the first three papers consider the radical extension of the (human) voice to anthropomorphized non-human narrators, Kun Qian’s paper investigates how AI can expand human cognitive landscapes without being fully anthropomorphized. In her engagement with Chen Qiufan’s story about the developmental entanglement of a pair of twin brothers and their AI companions, she shows how human cognition and personality are not locked in the head or genes but rather distributed environmentally, along the lines of the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) model of cognition, or “social minds” (Alan Palmer).

All four presenters, located in Asia, Europe, and North America, are early to mid-career scholars poised to remake the intersecting fields of cognitive narratology, critical animal studies, posthumanism, and global Asian literature. The organizer and presider, Haiyan Lee, has long been active in these fields and is well suited to facilitating the discussion. The presenters will precirculate their papers two weeks prior to the conference and will each speak for 14 minutes maximum. The remaining 15 minutes will be reserved for Q&A with the audience.