Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel by Elisha Cohn. Stanford University Press, 2025. 290 pages.
ANIMALS ARE EVERYWHERE in contemporary fiction. Why are novelists today so invested in the relationship of human beings to nonhuman animals, whether wild, caged, or domesticated? What might this tell us about shifts in how humans perceive themselves—from autonomous individuals to participants in a larger network of sentient creatures? These questions propel Elisha Cohn’s fascinating new book, Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel.
“As contemporary fiction grapples with humans as emergent organisms that participate socially in a biotic context with other living creatures,” Cohn’s thesis runs, “it centers the creatureliness of literary style.” Cohn argues that contemporary novels furnish us with new, less hierarchical ways by which we might relate to animals, as members of a shared “milieu”—Cohn’s favored term and the linchpin of her study. Cohn’s theory owes a considerable debt to Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s theory of “Umwelt” (roughly, “environment”). The concept of milieu “expresses how multiple Umwelten relate: animals do not share an Umwelt with other species […] but we do share a milieu.” Milieu, in other words, is more relational. “There is nothing inherently liberatory about milieu,” Cohn clarifies, “even as it redistributes world-making sentience.” Indeed, “the concept of milieu […] can be as constraining and normative as it can be liberating.” Milieu can loosen up certain rigid hierarchies and ideas about difference, but it is no cure-all…