Behold an Animal

Thangam Ravindranathan is an associate professor of French at Brown University. She is the author of Là où je ne suis pas: récits de dévoyage (2012) and Donner le change: L’impensé animal (with Antoine Traisnel, 2016). Her essays have appeared in French Forum, Symposium, differences, SubStance, New Formations, L’Esprit créateur, and Critique.

To '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 Ecocritique

• IntroductionChapter One. Melancholy of HorsepowerChapter Two. Man of the ForestChapter Three. Vague DogChapter Four. "Barely a hedgehog, strictly speaking"Epilogue: The Case of the Hermit Crab Notes