The Other in Western literature

Chaos, Order, and Alterity: The Function and Significance of Giants in Medieval German Epic

by Tina Boyer

The Battle of "Good" and Evil in Robert Louis Stevenson’s "The Suicide Club"

by Buket Akgun

Akgün, Buket. "The Battle of 'Good' and Evil in Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Suicide Club'." 23rd All-Turkey English Literature Conference, 24-26 April 2002: Evil in English Literature Proceedings. İstanbul: MAS, 2003. 180-87.

In the story “The Suicide Club” Robert Louis Stevenson is dealing with the problem of masculinity in a decadent... more In the story “The Suicide Club” Robert Louis Stevenson is dealing with the problem of masculinity in a decadent society in which males have completely lost the definition of traditional role of masculinity. That Stevenson feels the masculinity anxiety provoking him to write these stories is a clear indication that those sexual roles are artificial and distress producing. If Stevenson sees “good” as the “real” men and “bad” is, again for him, deviations from the norms, then this shows the corruptive and self-assertive nature of society itself. The text of “The Suicide Club” abounds with indications of the slipperiness and ambiguity of gender roles as assigned by society and that ambiguity is in itself suggestive of “gay bashing”. This is actually what Stevenson is doing under the disguise of presenting an allegory of good and evil. The gay man becomes the “other” and is put into the same category as other “others” such as the American Silas Q. Scuddamore, the French Madame Zéphyrine, and the Arabian author whose text is actually being reconstructed by the Victorian male.

“Finding Levinasian Passivity in Sartre’s Description of Shame”

by Kris Sealey

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Volume 41(3), May 2010

My claim is that the formal ontology of Being and Nothingness is resistant to the truths revealed in its descriptive... more My claim is that the formal ontology of Being and Nothingness is resistant to the truths revealed in its descriptive analyses of the Other. As such, I argue for a reading of these sections of Sartre’s text as a betrayal of its overall phenomenological endeavor. To demonstrate this betrayal, I present, alongside each other, Levinas’ and Sartre’s readings of the event of shame, showing that, descriptively, there is very little difference between them. This makes the little to no concurrence in their formal analyses somewhat of a surprise. Both identify shame as a ‘revelation’ of an aspect of ourselves, which we would ‘like to hide’. Sartre describes this aspect as ‘degraded’ , while Levinas describes it as a mode of “ourselves as diminished beings.”  Nonetheless, despite his concrete descriptions, Sartre never articulates the structural passivity of an imploded subject, which is the theme of Levinas’ analysis of shame. I claim that this is the case because, against the very methodology used in a phenomenological analysis, Sartre’s formal structures betray the concrete descriptions to which they should be accountable. As such, I read his concrete descriptions of shame as that which calls into question his formal ontology of a radically free ‘I’, void of all being. These concrete descriptions of shame more adequately articulate a region on the hither side of (intentional) experience, falling into neither categories of reflective or pre-reflective experience. It is in this vein that I advocate a reading of Sartrean shame through a Levinasian formalization of identity, insofar as this (latter) formalization can better account for what those descriptions positively signify.

"Levinas’ Early Account of Transcendence: Locating Alterity in the Il y a"

by Kris Sealey

Levinas Studies, An Annual Review, Volume 5, October 2010

In this paper I argue that Emmanuel Levinas sets the groundwork for his philosophy of transcendence in his account of... more In this paper I argue that Emmanuel Levinas sets the groundwork for his philosophy of transcendence in his account of impersonal existence, or the il y a. Focus on Levinas’ ethics by commentators has tended to conceal this relation, particularly insofar as Levinas was a philosopher of transcendence before he was a philosopher of ethics. Most notably, in On Escape in the mid-1930’s, he presented an analysis of transcendence in the form of an account of the possibility of escape or exit from Being.  He calls this form of transcendence “excendence”, employing it to describe a pure need to get out, without desiring to go anywhere in particular. This account was oriented around a description of a troubled and aporetic alterity, a recourse to which responds to the intensity with which our foothold in Being is felt. It is through this intensity that the demand for an ‘otherwise than being’ is born. To say this differently, the uninterrupted fact of Being, that its pervasiveness renders escaping impossible, generates a call for that which is radically and absolutely ‘other’.

"Beyond the Land of Nod: Syriac Images of Asia and the Historiography of ‘the West’”

by Annette Yoshiko Reed

History of Religions 49.1 (2009) 48–87.

Mr. Hyde and Stagg R. Leigh: The Doppelgänger as Recurring Trope

by Diana Eidson

A metaphysical imaginary friend, the doppelgänger, or “double goer,” walks where the real self cannot or will not... more A metaphysical imaginary friend, the doppelgänger, or “double goer,” walks where the real self cannot or will not tread. Typically an invisible, sympathetic presence, the doppelgänger wreaks havoc when it appears, portending evil to its owner and causing great confusion to others. Sometimes categorized as a monster in folklore or associated with the power of bilocation, this image of the Other is manifest only in simulacra. Such a shadow gives its owner an enticing power: to be at once himself and someone else. Writers have long employed the doppelgänger to suggest a physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual other. Sometimes, as in Dostoyevsky’s The Double, the alter ego is purely imaginary, representing mental illness or fantasy. In other cases, Conrad’s Secret Sharer, for example, the figure is actually a separate human form, but is nonetheless a projection of the character’s needs or desires. Fictional characters call doppelgängers into being in order to extricate themselves from a moral quagmire, and their appearance and appropriation of the owner’s identity portends significant ethical consequences for the owner and for other characters in the text.

Any number of doppelgängers in literature could prove this hypothesis of an ethical origin: Edward Hyde, Frankenstein’s creature, Count Dracula’s vampire persona. In each case, a character faces an ethical dilemma: How does one achieve one’s desires without sacrificing one’s wellbeing? Each protagonist wishes, creates, or lives another life to obtain his desires with impunity. Creating another persona causes the loss of psychological wellbeing and more important, the loss of human lives. The most compelling consequence of the doppelgänger’s presence is that it can become so powerful as to take over not only the owner’s body, but also his very soul. Edward Hyde provides an illustrative example of the doppelgänger as a morally liminal and problematic presence. Sharing compelling commonalities, the doppelgängers in two novels substantiate the validity of this theory of ethics: Mr. Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Stagg R. Leigh of Percival Everett’s Erasure. The authors do not share a common race, nationality, or historical era, yet they do share a similar ethical construct. Stevenson’s novella retains a large degree of its original popularity as a horror tale, but many critics consider the story to be a morality tale with allegorical elements. By contrast, the reading audience of current fiction does not often discuss Percival Everett’s Erasure in terms of its ethical dilemmas and consequences. Though Everett’s book shows clear ties to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man , it also shows striking similarities to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so striking that it is likely that Everett intended Stagg R. Leigh to be a pastiche of the archetypal Hyde. The doppelgänger figures of Edward Hyde and Stagg R. Leigh act as morally troubling and overpowering presences for their owners, and ultimately, their conquest of their owners’ consciousness leads to devastating ethical consequences. In this way, Edward Hyde serves as a literary forerunner of the enigmatic Stagg R. Leigh.