Description
Book SynopsisAs animals recede from our world, what tale is being told by literature's creatures? Resisting naturalist assumptions that an animal in a story is simply - literally or metaphorically - an animal, Thangam Ravindranathan understands it rather as the location of something missing.
Trade ReviewTo 'behold an animal' Thangam Ravindranathan suggestively argues, is literature’s temptation and taunt; the animal is always slightly ‘out of focus’ and so a token of literature’s own unrealness. Deeply theoretical and written in a prose that renders the animal at once palpable and unknowable, her readings demonstrate how dogs, horses, crabs, and hedgehogs mark the limits of representation even as they give life and breath to language." — Kari Weil, author of
Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now"The question of the animal, revolving as it does on paradoxes of otherness and exteriority, allows Thangam Ravindranathan to catch the ‘soul’ of some of the best recent French novels. The horses, dogs, wolves, hedgehogs, and hermit crabs that populate their works reveal the inner pulse of today’s literature. Once brought into conversation with thinkers like Agamben, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, or Heidegger, they animate these novels and open vistas on the divide between humans and animals so as to invent a new ontology of fiction." — Jean-Michel Rabate; author of
Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the human"
Behold an Animal makes an original and major contribution to animal studies by arguing for a deconstructive approach that counters the call to read animals literally and by revealing surprising connections between primary and secondary texts." — Stephanie Posthumus, author of
French EcocritiqueTable of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter One. Melancholy of Horsepower
Chapter Two. Man of the Forest
Chapter Three. Vague Dog
Chapter Four. "Barely a hedgehog, strictly speaking"
Epilogue: The Case of the Hermit Crab
Notes
