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.
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