Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bishop, Graham L

Titel

(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires

Ist Teil von

• MLN, 2020-09, Vol.135 (4), p.912-935

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Bibliografía de la Literatura Española

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the autobiographical animal in “L’Animal que donc je suis” and Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the contemporary subject, this paper explores two contemporary Francophone novels that fall under the genre of “animal autobiography”: Alain Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porcépic (2006) and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires de la jungle (2010). Bishop reads these novels as examples of a narrative temporality whereby humans can both follow after and be present with animal others, attributing this temporality to the novels’ shared technique of metalepsis. Although both novels initially assume the form indicated by their titles — “memoirs” authored by animal subjects who recollect past experiences — the intrusions made by voices of human narrators at the ends of both works draw attention to and undermine the artificial boundaries of this form.