Flocking together : collective animal minds in contemporary fiction

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)