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Issue 10
Summer 2009
Approaching Otherness

Issue 10

Approaching Otherness

Irretrievably divided, unavoidably connected: Encounters of self and other

Maeve Tynan
University of Limerick
The paradoxical nature of otherness, as defined by continental philosophy, is that the other represents that which is wholly divergent from, and as a corollary, constitutive of the self.

Part One: Border Crossings

The Otherness of Babylon and Jerusalem: The Bilateral Character of Exile and Otherness in Irish Literature

Michael Böss
Aarhus University
In the first decades of the Irish Free State, a Catholic-Gaelic Irishness was institutionalised as part of the new state's nation-building project. One side-effect was the alienation of writers and artists who did not identify with the Ireland that was coming into being.

Masters and Slaves: Britain’s Cultural Selves in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin

Damien Shortt
Edge Hill University
This paper will explore the representation of self and other in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin (2006); it will argue that this novel functions as a cultural diagnosis of contemporary Britain’s crisis of identity.

Sounds of Otherness: The Representation of Music in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto

Vera Alexander
Aarhus University
This essay analyses Ann Patchett's novel Bel Canto (2001), discussing the relationship of literature and music in terms of the novel's politics of representation.

Part Two: Photographic Spectrality

Reconstructing Eve: Spectres and Identities of the Transforming Ideal

Carrie O’Connor
Louisiana State University
In light of increased critical works on photography and its literary effects during the nineteenth century, I propose a new reading of the French author Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel, L’Eve Future.

Others and their others: Spectrality and monstrosity in the photographs of Roger Ballen

Lewis Johnson
Bahçeşehir University
This essay argues that what is disturbing and strange about the best of Roger Ballen’s work is linked to the ways in which it invokes the related spectralities of the photographed other and a discriminatory racist gaze.

Part Three: Gender and Alterity

Female Others, Female Freaks: From P.T. Barnum’s American Museum to The Residents’ Freak Show

Ib Johansen
University of Aarhus
The present paper attempts to trace a trajectory from the classic status of the female freak in the Victorian Age (exemplified by P.T. Barnum's spectacular sideshows) up to a number of twentieth-century literary examples of female freakery.

Constituting the moral subject: The self and the other in gender theories of justice

Henriette Dahan Kalev
Ben Gurion University
Political Feminist readers in theories of social justice, such as McKinnon and Okin often present a radical critique that subverts traditional theories but tends to withdraw to liberal traditional solutions.

Producing and Consuming Passions: Women Workers and Writing Desires in Melville’s New England

Inger Hunnerup Dalsgaard
Aarhus Univeristy
This article analyses Herman Melville’s diptych of short stories entited ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ (1855).

Part Four: Beckettian Alterity and the Plight of Perception

Alterity and Antipathy: The Plight of Anti-Levinasian man, in Beckett’s The Expelled and Other Novellas

Órla Slattery
Mary Immaculate College
This paper shall focus on the treatment of the other as it is explored in Samuel Beckett’s The Expelled and Other Novellas. It shall be argued that the marginalised anti-hero featured in this work, provides a fitting counterpoise to the Levinasian ethical agent.

Eschewing the Other in Quest of the Wombtomb: Alterity in Beckett’s Film

Lasse Gammelgaard
Aarhus University
This paper will probe the exploration of the ontological status of human subjectivity and consciousness in Samuel Beckett’s only film titled Film. The protagonist O (for Object) is in flight of the camera E (for Eye) but eventually discovers that E is not extraneous to self.

Part Five: Monstrous Others

‘The glowing extremity of life on the edge of itself’: The vampire other in Diana Evans’ 26a

Marie Lauritzen
University of Aarhus
This article aims to provide an innovative close reading of Diana Evans’ 26a (2006). Instead of approaching themes of national and cultural identity, or confusion hereof, this black and British author offers a meditation on same and other by way of threshold positions such as life and death, human a

Self as Other: The Doppelgänger

Gry Faurholt
Aahus University
The central premise of the doppelgänger motif poses the paradox of encountering oneself as another; the logically impossible notion that the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’ are somehow identical.

The Golem in the Room: Permutations of Otherness and Transnational Memory in Dionne Brand’s What we all Long For and Salman Rushdie’s Fury

Pavlina Radia
University of Toronto
As globalisation has increasingly hybridized geophysical borders and boundaries, it has also produced a whole plethora of socio-cultural, gendered, and racialized asymmetries. Such asymmetries shape the novels, What We All Long For by Dionne Brand and Fury by Salman Rushdie.

As the necessary limit against which the self can be defined, otherness has been inseparable from human identity and affairs from time immemorial. The birth of subjectivity ineluctably implicates the birth of its concomitant and allegedly dark twin.

But where is this schism between the I and other located? In what ways are their complex relations constructed and discerned?

In undertaking to debate otherness from new angles and agendas, this issue of Double Dialogues has been consciously complied as work written in and to a contemporary world continuously struggling with questions of otherness.

 

Double Dialogues | Refereed Arts Journal | ISSN 1447-9591  
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