Suchergebnisse

This essay is a speculative reflection on literary fiction's—and notably the contemporary French novel's—ability to register the effects of climate change. The first half engages with Amitav Ghosh's thinking on this question in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The second examines Marguerite Duras's Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) as a novel about rising sea levels and discusses what it might mean to read this classic in these terms. The essay then considers which works today might be Duras's successors and what such a refocusing of our sights on the material effects on the earth of fossil-fueled capitalism and empire implies for reading today.

This essay considers the lobster of Samuel Beckett's early story "Dante and the Lobster" as what disturbs the count. Assumed to be dead, only to then be revealed alive when it is about to enter the cooking pot, the lobster here is an "incalculable factor" that unsettles narrative consciousness and time. The author reads various aspects of this disturbance, and particularly how the lobster's "nervous [. . .] life" as encrypted in two small terms of the story—"cruel pot" and "neuter creature"—emerges as an early inscription of a trapped or unvoicable "I" foretelling the self's dispossession in Beckett's later writings.

This essay considers through a string of three fables—a classic wolf trap in La Fontaine, Poe's story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and contemporary French novelist Eric Chevillard's Sans l'orang-outan—the animal as the paradoxical, derealized figure of a passing. Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Thomas Keenan, and Maurice Blanchot, among others, the essay understands this passing as a duplicitous logic (that is, one involving a fold, a lag, and a return that precedes a turn) that has the animal standing on certain telling thresholds vis-à-vis the whole, responsible (human) subject. Whether naively eavesdropping at the door, criminally entering an apartment, or tragically exiting the world, the animal is somehow always not yet or no longer in the place of accountable agency that a narrative might bear. This logic can in turn be understood as a function of un-equality, for the animal marks a point at which language or narrative is unequal to itself. The singular, constitutive thresholds or folds of these fables in turn betray something of how language or narrative might work, in what nameless bodies—and even bodiless names—it secretly trades.