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The Animal Gaze in Beckett, Sebald and Coetzee
from Part II - On Literary History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2024
What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?
This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.
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