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Chapter 10 - Blind Seeing

Deathwriting from Dickinson to the Contemporary

from Part II - On Literary History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2024

Peter Boxall
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This 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.

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Chapter
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The Possibility of Literature
The Novel and the Politics of Form
, pp. 206 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Blind Seeing
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.013
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  • Blind Seeing
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.013
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Blind Seeing
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.013
Available formats
×