Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 “It’s a Question of Words, Therefore” : Becoming-Animal in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This essay reads Michel Faber's debut novel Under the Skin (2000) in the context of contemporary philosophical and literary-critical debates about the ethical relation between human and nonhuman animals. It argues that Faber's text engages with, but deconstructs, the traditional division of "no language, no subjectivity" by a heretical act of renaming human beings as "vodsels," and by an extensive process of figurative transformation. The paper then proceeds to a sustained analysis of the main character in the novel, Isserley, in the light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of becoming-animal, the anomalous, and becoming-molecular. The paper concludes that the novel engages in the limitrophy—Derrida's neologism—required to negotiate the abyssal limit between the human and nonhuman animal.' (Editor's abstract)

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Last amended 18 Sep 2012 12:42:44
134-154 “It’s a Question of Words, Therefore” : Becoming-Animal in Michel Faber’s Under the Skinsmall AustLit logo Science Fiction Studies
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