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- Title
The Modern Magnetic Animal: "As I Lay Dying" and the Uncanny Zoology of Modernism.
- Authors
White, Christopher T.
- Abstract
The main characters in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" use animal metaphors throughout the novel to convey meanings and affects ("my mother is a fish"). At the same time, "real" animals (horses, cows, mules) are continually announcing their presence through groans, snuffings, lows and cries. In its treatment of the inarticulate animal cry, "As I Lay Dying" re-situates (human) language within a larger continuum of communicative processes that are ahuman; at the same time, through its pervasive and self-reflexive animal discourse, the novel exposes traces of animality within language itself. Broadly speaking, modernity finds the domain of animality (the body, the living) reconceived in terms of electro-magnetic forces in flux, of uncanny communication and transference. Read against this cultural-historical backdrop, the figure of the animal assumes a haunting presence in "As I Lay Dying's" distinctly modernist strategies of representation, and in its reflections on language, communication, and the modern subject.
- Subjects
AS I Lay Dying (Book : Faulkner); FAULKNER, William, 1897-1962; ANIMALS; MODERNITY; SUBJECTIVITY; MAGNETISM; ZOOLOGY; MODERNISM (Christian theology); 20TH century (Literary period)
- Publication
Journal of Modern Literature, 2008, Vol 31, Issue 3, p81
- ISSN
0022-281X
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.2979/JML.2008.31.3.81