Abstract
This article asks how far it is possible to identify a new kind of embodied being emerging in the contemporary imagination. It suggests that, particularly in the late work of J. M. Coetzee, one can see a fleeting utopian space opening, in which being is detached from species categorization, and from all forms of taxonomy. Coetzee, and a range of other novelists, the article argues, craft the possibility of a mode of being and of thinking that is not shaped by classical theological and taxonomical distinctions between the human and the animal.
Keywords
J. M. Coetzee, Jacques Derrida, embodied being, human, language, narrative, realism
How to Cite
Boxall, P., (2012) “Between Human and Animal: Realism and species indeterminacy in J. M. Coetzee's late fiction”, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 1(1), 87–101.