A Reader’s Response Approach to Lydia Millet’s “Zoogoing”

Sammanfattning: Since its establishment, the study of environmental literature has included a great deal of research which has based its arguments on assumptions that state that climate fiction contains persuasive elements that are impactful on readers. The problem with these assumptions is that they do not offer any empirical proof to demonstrate their arguments. This thesis offers an empirical study of the reception of Lydia Millet’s short story “Zoogoing” and examines whether or not the story is able to generate an animal welfare consciousness in the context of climate change within an audience that includes 10 participants from Bahrain. This project was conducted via two surveys on SurveySparrow, one before and the other after the participants had read the story. From the findings, it was revealed that the extinction narrative was able to help the readers conceptualize future ecological possibilities. Although the narrative was able to heighten the participants’ consciousness about environmental destruction, their concern for animal conservation remained the same. What was speculated from the analysis in this thesis was that the story had lacked a representation of animals that would focus the participants’ gaze on animal extinction.