In spite of Emmanuel Levinas’s famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a “post-Levinasian” approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Eyes of the Poor.” In the narrator’s inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, “across all literature the human face speaks -- or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature.” June 2008: Kuisma Korhonen is currently a docent of Comparative Literature and a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (Humanity Books, 2006), and numerous essays, in Finnish, English, and French, on literature and philosophy. He is also the editor of Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate (Rodopi, 2006), the guest-editor of the special issue Layers of the Past: Life, Death, Memory of the e-journal Protocols: History and Theory (7, 2008), and co-editor of Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (Lexington Books, forthcoming).Starting with August 2008, he will be a professor of Literature at the University of Oulu, Finland. |
|
|
|
