Emergency contact: Compassion and precarious love in Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden

  1. Darias-Beautell, Eva 1
  1. 1 Universidad de La Laguna, Spain
Revista:
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

ISSN: 0021-9894,  1741-6442

Año de publicación: 2020

Páginas: 1-15

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1177/0021989420971001 GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Resumen

This article examines the relation between affect and agency in Michael Christie’s short story collection The Beggar’s Garden (2011). It builds its argument on recent philosophical discussions about the oxymoronic nature of the relational subject. Many contemporary thinkers have emphasized the fundamental paradox that affective relations are as necessary as they are profoundly destabilizing of the subject’s supposed autonomy. Following this train of thought, a number of studies have appeared that explore the relation between vulnerability and agency. Would a focus on affective relations and the subsequently increased sense of vulnerability produce or foreclose action? The article takes this question to the field of the literary to provide a critical reading of the first two stories in Christie’s collection, “Emergency Contact” and “Discard”, both of which probe, in very different ways, the power of affect in the midst of highly precarious material conditions. Drawing on the work of feminist materialist scholars Sara Ahmed, Marianne Hirsch, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum, who have explored how the experience of vulnerability may imply a radical openness toward surprising possibilities, I investigate how each of these two stories may produce unexpected spaces of human agency through the affective energy of compassion and love.

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