Poetics Of Alterity

Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the ethics of alterity—which argues that an ethical relation to the other is one that acknowledges the irreducibility of otherness—Zhou offers a reconceptualization of both self and other. Taking difference as a source of creativity and turning it into a form of resistance and a critical intervention, Asian American poets engage with broader issues than the merely poetic. They confront social injustice against the other and call critical attention to a concept of otherness which differs fundamentally from that underlying racism, sexism, and colonialism. By locating the ethical and political questions of otherness in language, discourse, aesthetics, and everyday encounters, Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and popular culture as well as in poetry. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity is not limited, however, to literary studies: it is an invaluable response to the questions raised by increasingly globalized encounters across many kinds of boundaries. The Poets Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Myung Mi Kim, Li Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, and John Yau

This volume focuses on language and ethics in literary genres, such as dystopia, science fiction, and fantasy, that depict encounters with alterity. Indeed, so-called “genre literature” embodies a heuristic model that dramatizes and exacerbates these encounters by featuring exotic, subhuman or post-human beings that defy human knowledge, elements particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. These genres have often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting its scope to a hollow and servile repetition of genre codes. This volume shows unequivocally that this field does lend itself to such reflections. The contributors to this book highlight genre literature’s defamiliarising power, through which things can be “seen”. In meta-conceptualising the relationship between language and reality, it problematises and enhances this relation by making it more easily perceivable. The book shows that, rather than contenting itself with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the boundary between the readerly and the writerly. In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how can what escapes humanity be described in human language? How can human language represent things that have no known referent in the reader’s world of experience? This collection of essays reveals that the most prototypical traits of genre literature lie in the encounter with otherness and the linguistic issues this raises.

POETICS OF ALTERITY Education today is commonly oriented towards citizenship and skills for life, with aims of happiness and wellbeing. But this benign image harbours surreptitious forms of control, which ultimately undermine the goods it professes to safeguard and stifle education’s very purpose. What release can there be from these constrictions? Release is to be found, as Soyoung Lee eloquently shows, by attending to elements of experience that seem to escape our grip, from challenging aspects of our moral lives to struggles over practicalities of curriculum content. The more robust, more outward-turning orientation she demonstrates emphasises engagement with subject-matter, with problems and forms of narrative, that defy pre-determined formulations and categories. This requires turning towards objects worthy of attention and towards people and their claims on us. The arts and the humanities have special importance as spaces where alterity presents and expresses itself. Lee’s dialogue with Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Celan shows how acknowledgement of the other must condition not only practices of teaching and learning but practicalities of our social and political lives. Attending to anxieties inherent in teaching and learning, in school and the wider world, the book’s powerful rationale for the curriculum provides nothing less than a new grounding for the humanities.

Using the concept of otherness as an entry point into a discussion of poetry, Jonathan Hart's study explores the role of history and theory in relation to literature and culture. Chapters range from trauma in Shakespeare to Bartolomé de Las Casas' representation of the Americas to the trench poets to voices from the Holocaust.

Antonio Machado (1875-1939) is one of Spain’s most original and renowned twentieth-century poets and thinkers. From his early poems in Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas of 1907, to the writings of his alter-ego Juan de Mairena of the 1930s, Machado endeavoured to explain how the Other became a concern for the self. In The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s “Proverbios y cantares,” Nicolás Fernández-Medina examines how Machado’s “Proverbios y cantares,” a collection of short, proverbial poems spanning from 1909 to 1937, reveal some of the poet’s deepest concerns regarding the self-Other relationship. To appreciate Machado’s organizing concept of otherness in the “Proverbios y cantares,” Fernández-Medina argues how it must be contextualized in relation to the underlying Romantic concerns that Machado struggled with throughout most of his oeuvre, such as autonomy, solipsism and skepticism of absolutes. In The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s “Proverbios y cantares,” Fernández-Medina demonstrates how Machado continues a practice of “fragment thinking” to meld the poetic and the philosophical, the part and whole, and the finite and infinite to bring light to the complexities of the self-Other relationship and its relevance in discussions of social and ethical improvement in early twentieth-century Spain.

Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville’s solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.

Many critics have noticed the paradoxes and contradictions in the work of William Carlos Williams but few have analyzed them in detail. Professor Ahearn argues that Williams criticism has not gone far enough in recognizing the uses Williams saw for contradiction. He contends that Williams began to acquire his own voice as a poet when he recognized that he could be a vehicle for contending voices. His reading departs from previous examinations of the early poetry in the emphasis it places on the poems as expressions of Williams' social position. We find a Williams whose contribution to modernism came not through a radical break with tradition or a rejection of inherited poetic norms alone, but rather in a cultivation of tension, conflict, and a kind of poetic "crisis" that could be held forth as the metier of the modernist writer.