BiblioVault - Books about Other (Philosophy) in literature

The Art of Time

Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel

Nina L. Molinaro

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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The Deliverance of Others

Reading Literature in a Global Age

David Palumbo-Liu

Duke University Press, 2012

The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue the tradition of valorizing literature for bringing the lives of others to us, admitting them into our world and valuing the difference that they introduce into our lives? In this new historical situation, are we not forced to determine how much otherness is acceptable, as opposed to how much is excessive, disruptive, and disturbing?

The influential literary critic David Palumbo-Liu suggests that we can arrive at a sense of responsibility toward others by reconsidering the discourses of sameness that deliver those unlike ourselves to us. Through virtuoso readings of novels by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki, he shows how notions that would seem to offer some basis for commensurability between ourselves and others—ideas of rationality, the family, the body, and affect—become less stable as they try to accommodate more radical types of otherness. For Palumbo-Liu, the reading of literature is an ethical act, a way of thinking through our relations to others.

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Embodiments of Evil

Gog and Magog: Interdisciplinary Studies of the "Other" in Literature & Internet Texts

Edited by A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, F. Doufikar-Aerts, and S. McGlinn

Leiden University Press, 2011

Gog and Magog, as archetypes of evil, have dwelt in our consciousness since their threatening appearance in the Bible and Quran. Maps, literature and texts ranging from Medieval Europe, the Byzantine and Arab world, in Berber, Persian and Indonesian traditions, to contemporary internet texts: all use these imaginary monstrous creatures. The figures are constantly reinterpreted as the enemies of order change. Gog and Magog have been represented with dog heads, snake tongues. On the covers of contemporary Arab apocalyptic literature they may be giants or half-humans.
This volume Embodiments of Evil: Gog and Magog reveals in eight essays the images of the ‘Other’ in genres ranging from contemporary folk religion on the internet to the rich literary heritage of Alexander romances.

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Journeys from Scandinavia

Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000

Elisabeth Oxfeldt

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

For all of the scholarship done on postcolonial literatures, little has been applied to Scandinavian writing. Yet, beginning with the onset of tourism beyond Scandinavia in the 1840s, a compelling body of prose works documents Scandinavian attitudes toward foreign countries and further shows how these Scandinavian travelers sought to portray themselves to uncharted cultures.

Focusing on Danish and Norwegian travelogues, Elisabeth Oxfeldt traces the evolution of Scandinavian travel writing over two centuries using pivotal texts from each era, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Oxfeldt situates each one in its historical and geopolitical context, and her close readings delineate how each travelogue reflects Scandinavia’s ongoing confrontation between Self and the non-European cultural Other.

A long-overdue examination of travel literature produced by some of Denmark and Norway’s greatest writers, Journeys from Scandinavia unpacks the unstable constructions of Scandinavian cultural and national identity and, in doing so, complicates the common assumption of a homogeneous, hegemonic Scandinavia.

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Nakagami, Japan

Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

Anne McKnight

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn’t know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), who counted himself among the buraku-min, Japan’s largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of buraku writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan.

In Nakagami, Japan, Anne McKnight shows how the writer’s exploration of buraku led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see him much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.

As she considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, McKnight reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. Her analysis of the resulting “rhetorical activism” lays bare Nakagami’s unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race, ethnicity, and citizenship—in Japan, but also on an international scale.

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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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Practices of Coexistence

Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions

Marianna D. Birnbaum

Central European University Press, 2017

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the “image of the Other” in the early modern period . They deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary-like historical accounts that express ethnographic sensitivities. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate digression of traditional scholars’ focus and the investigation of rarely examined regions and practices. This approach allows the contributors to spotlight their special areas of research and to share a fresh new look at “the Renaissance.”

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Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger

David Simpson

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. In Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, David Simpson locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in a tradition that extends from antiquity to today.

Simpson shows that debates about strangers loomed large in the French Republic of the 1790s, resulting in heated discourse that weighed who was to be welcomed and who was to be proscribed as dangerous. Placing this debate in the context of classical, biblical, and other later writings, he identifies a persistent difficulty in controlling the play between the despised and the desired. He examines the stranger as found in the works of Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and Southey, as well as in depictions of the betrayals of hospitality in the literature of slavery and exploration—as in Mungo Park's Travels and Stedman's Narrative—and portrayals of strange women in de Staël, Rousseau, and Burney. Contributing to a rich strain of thinking about the stranger that includes interventions by Ricoeur and Derrida, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger reveals the complex history of encounters with alien figures and our continued struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown.

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Strange Meetings

Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960

Peter Edgerly Firchow

Catholic University of America Press, 2008

Building upon his earlier book The Death of the German Cousin (1986), renowned author Peter Edgerly Firchow focuses Strange Meetings on major modern British writers from Eliot to Auden and explores the development of British conceptions and misconceptions of Germany and Germans from 1910 to 1960.

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To Save and to Destroy

Writing as an Other

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Harvard University Press, 2025

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.

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Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference

Rebecca N. Mitchell

The Ohio State University Press, 2011