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Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature

Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Donald R. Wehrs

In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth century’s most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity’s Rainbow, as well as with such innovative recent works as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Gabrielle Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle, depicting Italian colonization of Ethiopia and African immigration to Italy. Essays in the collection consider new media (radio) and explore such issues as the ethics of representation in British and American modernism, memory and subject formation in children’s literature, voice in radio, embodiment and performance in drama, trauma and affectivity in postcolonial and postmodern contexts, narrative depiction of temporal disorientation in contemporary fiction, and the challenges of fashioning ethical literary responses to the horrific and unspeakable. An introduction situates Levinas’s thought in relation to both the history of Western philosophy and current critical theory, and an overview of Levinas’s career considers his work as a response to the twentieth-century European experience from pre-World War One progressivism to 1980s anti-immigrant agitation. Each essay highlights both how Levinas’s work may contribute to literary criticism and how literary criticism may interrogate and refine philosophical discourse. By delineating connections linking literature, philosophy, critical theory, and cultural-historical analysis, the collection situates Levinas within the contexts of his own century even as it offers accounts of the unity and diversity of literature the century produced. In articulating relationships between Levinasian themes and preoccupations and those shaping modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, gender studies, globalism, and in exploring the kinship between Levinas’s work and other forms of anti-totalizing twentieth-century thought, the collection probes how modernist technique and anti-totalizing ethics enter into relations that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, not only revitalize diverse national literatures but also produce post-national, migrant, or hybrid literatures marked by explorations of the entwinement of trauma and ethical subjectivity whose theorization Levinas pioneers.

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 384 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61149-442-6 • Hardback • May 2013 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-1-61149-650-5 • Paperback • March 2017 • $64.99 • (£50.00)

Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / General, Philosophy / Essays, Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature

Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Hardback

Paperback

Summary

In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth century’s most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity’s Rainbow, as well as with such innovative recent works as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Gabrielle Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle, depicting Italian colonization of Ethiopia and African immigration to Italy. Essays in the collection consider new media (radio) and explore such issues as the ethics of representation in British and American modernism, memory and subject formation in children’s literature, voice in radio, embodiment and performance in drama, trauma and affectivity in postcolonial and postmodern contexts, narrative depiction of temporal disorientation in contemporary fiction, and the challenges of fashioning ethical literary responses to the horrific and unspeakable. An introduction situates Levinas’s thought in relation to both the history of Western philosophy and current critical theory, and an overview of Levinas’s career considers his work as a response to the twentieth-century European experience from pre-World War One progressivism to 1980s anti-immigrant agitation. Each essay highlights both how Levinas’s work may contribute to literary criticism and how literary criticism may interrogate and refine philosophical discourse. By delineating connections linking literature, philosophy, critical theory, and cultural-historical analysis, the collection situates Levinas within the contexts of his own century even as it offers accounts of the unity and diversity of literature the century produced. In articulating relationships between Levinasian themes and preoccupations and those shaping modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, gender studies, globalism, and in exploring the kinship between Levinas’s work and other forms of anti-totalizing twentieth-century thought, the collection probes how modernist technique and anti-totalizing ethics enter into relations that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, not only revitalize diverse national literatures but also produce post-national, migrant, or hybrid literatures marked by explorations of the entwinement of trauma and ethical subjectivity whose theorization Levinas pioneers.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 384 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61149-442-6 • Hardback • May 2013 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-1-61149-650-5 • Paperback • March 2017 • $64.99 • (£50.00)

Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / General, Philosophy / Essays, Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Author

Donald R.Wehrs is professor of English at Auburn University.

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introductory Matters
Introduction: Levinas, the Twentieth Century, and its Literature: From Ethical Trauma to the Reconstitution of SubjectivityDonald R. Wehrs
Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995: A Twentieth-Century Intellectual Life Donald R. Wehrs
Levinas and the Fugitive Other: Consciousness, Representation, Affectivity, and Memory
“There are things that can’t be said”: Levinas and the Ethics of Representation in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s RoomRebecca Nicholson-Weir
Milne and the Tonstant Weaders: A Levinasian Case for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner Lorna Wood
Fidelity to Sexual Difference: Feminism, Levinas, and Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol SteinZahi Zalloua
Levinas and the Aesthetics of American Modernism
William Faulkner’s Embodied Subjectivities Benjamin Joshua Doty
Paterson as a Satyrical Work: The Epistemology of the Dance N. S. Boone .
Levinas and the Embodied Voice: Listening and Performance .
The Trumpets of Autocracies and the Still, Small Voices of Civilization: Levinas and Radio in a Time of CrisisTodd Avery

Dialogic Ethics through Levinas and Bakhtin: Dialogism and Infinite Obligation to the Other in Three Twentieth-Century Dramas Richard Middleton-Kaplan
Trauma and the Loss and Return of Character
Levinasian Subjectivity and Diminution of Character in Cien años de soledad and Gravity’s RainbowDonald R. Wehrs
The Augenblick of Reading in the Writing of J. M. Coetzee and Michael Ondaatje
Mike Marais
Levinas and Temporal Fracturing in New European and Postcolonial Fiction
The Art of Time: Levinasian Alterity and the Contemporary Spanish Novel

Nina L. Molinaro
Answering the Summons of the “Other”: Reading the Literature of Migrant and Postcolonial Italy with Emmanuel Levinas Norma Bouchard
Levinas, Apocalypse, and the Non-Imperializing Self
The Prophetic Thought of Emmanuel Levinas: Reading Two Contemporary Novels of the ShoahMerle Williams
Against the Akedah: Levinasian Paternity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Daniel T. Kline
About the Contributors
Index

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature

Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

Donald R. Wehrs

Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature

Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

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