Browsing by Author "Kelly, Christopher"

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    A Kid Called Chatter
    (2017) Kelly, Christopher; Van Herk, Aritha; Jenkins, Jacqueline; Martini, Clem
    A Kid Called Chatter is a novel about a boy who attracts dying jackrabbits. This affliction stymies his attempts at integration into normalized human communities, leading him to pursue marginalized peoples where he might find acceptance. At each attempt, however, he is beset by the narratives invented by those communities to account for the jackrabbits. As a result, the kid called Chatter is buffeted by the expectations of others, eventually reaching a folkloric position amidst gangs of territorial children. Through its biographical structure and thematic cadences, the narrative seeks to examine the way in which human populations make use of myth to confront stories that cannot be told, and the effects on the beings subjected to this projective impulse. The exegesis which follows the novel proposes that Western perspectives about the silence of animals can be used as an analogous base of study for the same phenomenon.