The Other Presences
Reading Literature Other-Wise after the Transnational Turn in American Studies
Florian Tatschner
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Florian Tatschner examines an alternative mode of reading fictional texts in the context of North American literature through “reading other-wise”: a mode of reading that regards the other in narratives not merely as a discursive construct of alterity, but as a presencing of otherness that resists discursive fixity. Waldenfels’s phenomenology constitutes the foundational approach of this work, and Lyotard’s poststructuralist philosophy of language, with its distinction between discursivity and figurality, offers a suitable framework for negotiating the relation between otherness and alterity. Drawing on the increasingly significant term “presence” in connection with phenomenon of otherness, Tatschner attempts to close a scholarly gap in the discourse on aesthetics regarding cultural difference as well as the relation between presence and aesthetics in American studies.
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