AustLit

'Using J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (Coetzee 1999) as a basis, our article compares the straightforward ethical reading of literature as an unproblematic means for creating reader sympathy (as exemplified by the work of Martha Nussbaum), with an approach based on Emmanuel Levinas's sense of otherness. For Levinas, reading involves an awareness of otherness that does not control or circumscribe the other, but that encourages a continual unfolding of its possibilities. In this connection, he distinguishes between the “said”, that which is complete, written down once and for all, and the “saying”, that which can “interrupt” our readerly assumptions by revealing the presence of otherness. The sense of otherness, because so fundamental to our interaction with the world, needs to be respected, our ethical obligation or responsibility towards it acknowledged. We believe The Lives of Animals fosters such a sense of obligation. It both thematises moral concerns and helps enact moral understanding, unlike a straightforward sympathetic approach, which depends on exclusionary opposition at the expense of a more knowing engagement with otherness.'  (Introduction)

'This article examines the various ways Martin Amis, J.M. Coetzee, Frank Kermode and Andrew Motion approach the problems associated with memorial reconstruction and veracity in their autobiographical writings. Using as a starting point James Olney’s notion of the “free conceptual construction” involved in our general way of making sense of the world, the article goes on to consider the means employed by these writers to negotiate with “the archive of the ‘real’” and the “archive of ‘fiction’”, to draw on Derrida’s terms (1992), in their various engagements with the conceptual construction of life stories. A special emphasis is placed on what Derek Attridge (2004) calls the “singularity” of that construction, its truth to itself as writing.' (Author's abstract)