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Blind seeing: deathwriting from Dickinson to the contemporary

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:25 authored by Peter Boxall
The essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics

ISSN

0950-2378

Publisher

Lawrence and Wishart

Volume

89-90

Page range

192-211

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Creative and Critical Thought Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-03-10

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-03-10

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-03-10

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