What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

Felix wrote his life of St. Guthlac also during the zenith of Latin writings in Anglo-Saxon England, namely in the early eighth century. In vivid, distinctive Latin Felix tells of the experiences of this solitary who went off into the fens of East Anglia to devote himself to God at Crowland, including his dramatic encounters with the demons of hell and various unusual miracles, including the retrieval of a parchment folio carried off by a thieving magpie.

Of all the Merovingian kings who came after Clovis, none has received more accolades than Dagobert I, considered to have been the last effective Merovingian, succeeded by increasingly less capable kings until the dynasty’s demise. Dagobert as a literary convention nevertheless had to be constructed, a process that began in the Chronicle of Fredegar. Fredegar’s portrayal is favorable up to a point, beyond which the chronicler singled out the king for reproof. The idealization of Dagobert reached new heights with the ninth-century Gesta Dagoberti I regis Francorum, which accentuated the king’s monastic patronage, particularly regarding Saint-Denis, where the composition was penned. In the early tenth century, Regino of Prüm used the Gesta Dagoberti to narrate the life ofDagobert in his Chronicle. The character Regino extracted from the Gesta Dagoberti was remolded to serve different aims. This chapter follows the story as it was related in Fredegar and the transformations it underwent in the Gesta Dagoberti. It then turns to the adaptation of the hagiographically inflected Dagobert narrative back into historiography in the tenth-century Chronicle of Regino of Prüm.

While Ambrose of Milan was a major actor on the ecclesiastical and political stage of late antiquity, he was also a devoted catechist and theologian. This chapter focuses on how Ambrose trained the spiritual senses of catechumens throughout Lenten and Eastern catechesis. In Lenten sermons on the patriarchs, Ambrose focused on baptism as a death to physical ways of seeing. In Holy Week sermons (On the Hexameron and Explanatio symboli), he sought to restructure catechetical knowledge by offering pro-Nicene accounts of God and creation. In mystagogical sermons (De mysteriis and De sacramentis), he gave neophytes instruction on how to perceive the spiritual meaning of the Christian rites.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

Vision science combines ideas from physics, biology, and psychology. The language and ideas of mathematics help scientists communicate and provide an initial framing for understanding the visual system. Mathematics combined with computational modeling adds important realism to the formulations. Together, mathematics and computational tools provide a realistic estimate of the initial signals the brain analyzes to render visual judgments (e.g., motion, depth, and color). This chapter first traces calculations from the representation of the light signal, to how that signal is transformed by the lens to the retinal image, and then how the image is converted into cone photoreceptor excitations. The central steps in the initial encoding rely heavily on linear systems theory and the mathematics of signal-dependent noise. We then describe computational methods that add more realism to the description of how light is encoded by cone excitations. Finally, we describe the mathematical formulation of the ideal observer using all the encoded information to perform a visual discrimination task, and Bayesian methods that combine prior information and sensory data to estimate the light input. These tools help us reason about the information present in the neural representation, what information is lost, and types of neural circuits for extracting information.

Focusing on the Middle English poem, Pearl (with evidence from other literary works), this essay considers how the initial situation of the Dreamer explores a half-dozen principles for literary invention that are distinctively medieval, including personal displacement and feelings of anxiety, bewilderment and marvelling. These qualities define the initial state of mind which enables the Dreamer’s visions to occur and develop. Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics (I. 2) that philosophising begins with wondering and questioning, a principle revered throughout the Middle Ages. Though all these elements of what we now call ‘creativity’ have their roots in practices of invention and argumentation described in ancient philosophy and rhetoric, the particular shapes that these classical principles assume by the late Middle Ages derive from long-established traditions of monastic meditation and contemplative envisioning more than from academic rhetoric and logic. Bonaventure’s opening to his Itinerarium mentis ad Deum recounts the marvel of Francis of Assisi’s seraphic vision, adapting it as a general method for meditation; Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale turns the marvels of the flying horse and visionary mirror into problems in optics and engineering. Pearl turns the dreamer’s initial wondering within a brilliant fantasy to the means for understanding his own human condition.

This chapter argues that thinking about Roberto Bolaño in the context of journalism and mass culture means recognizing how mainstays of globalized twentieth-century journalistic communication – photographic realism, reportage with a pretension of objectivity, investigative journalism – as well as discourses about literature, have circulated differently in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Explores in particular the convergences and divergences between Latin American and Spanish crónicas and North American New Journalism in Bolaño’s fiction and in his own newspaper writing, the essay argues that Bolaño’s portrayal of the daily cultural and political contexts one confronts in the newspaper reflects his suggestion that readers are always exiles, and that they produce a commentary on seeing as both a journalistic practice and a metaphor for social understanding. Bolaño draws on, but also rewrites, the history of literary journalism in a wider Atlantic world, even as he comments on the superficiality of mass media and culture. Discussing Bolaño’s engagement with cronistas such as Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Carlos Monsiváis, and Pedro Lemebel, the chapter includes discussions of 2666, Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño’s short stories, and articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines in Spain and Chile.