The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention

Jean-Michel Ganteau (1)

1 EMMA - Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone

This chapter addresses British novelist Jon McGregor’s third novel, Even the Dogs, a story of loss, trauma, and abandonment narrated by a spectral chorus of departed drug-addicts and dossers relegated into invisibility. It thematises survival as experienced by a group of excluded characters sharing a high degree of precariousness, going from one fix to the next, and minimally assisted by public policies that fall short of care and keep them in that very condition, that is, that of survivors. To do so, it focuses on the elegiac dimension of the novel, lingers on the experiential presentation of survival, and ends up on the ethics of attention to invisibilities

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Littératures

Jean-Michel Ganteau. The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention. Rudolf Freiburg; Gerd Bayer. The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Springer International Publishing, pp.49-67, 2021, 978-3-030-83421-0. ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_2⟩. ⟨hal-03565038⟩