ISSN 1904-6022 www.otherness.dk/journal April 2014 Edited by Susan Yi Sencindiver Copy edited by Gry Faurholt Living Literary Others Cover photo by David Lindbjerg, courtesy of the artist. Living Literary Others Volume 4 · Number 2 · April 2014 Welcoming the interdisciplinary study of otherness and alterity, Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, full-text, and peer-reviewed e-journal under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. The journal publishes new scholarship primarily within the humanities and social sciences. ISSUE EDITOR Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD COPY EDITOR Gry Faurholt GENERAL EDITOR Dr. Maria Beville Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick ASSOCIATE EDITORS Susan Yi Sencindiver, PhD Aarhus University, Denmark Matthias Stephan Aarhus University, Denmark © 2014 Otherness: Essays and Studies ISSN 1904-6022 Further information: www.otherness.dk/journal/ Otherness: Essays and Studies is an open-access, non-profit journal. All work associated with the journal by its editors, editorial assistants, editorial board, and referees is voluntary and without salary. The journal does not require any author fees nor payment for its publications. Cover photo by David Lindbjerg, courtesy of the artist. Volume 4 · Number 2 · April 2014 CONTENTS Notes on Contributors iv Introduction: Living Literary Others (and its Post-Linguistic Challenges) 1 Susan Yi Sencindiver 1 Authors and Others: 21 The Ethics of Inhabiting in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello Anna Jones Abramson 2 The Internal Other: 51 Dorothy Allison’s White Trash Mélanie Grué 3 Like Eliza Rachel Félix: 71 Enacting Change in Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask Nevena Stojanovic 4 Of Monsters and Men: 105 Absent Mothers and Unnatural Children in the Gothic ‘Family Romance’ Donna Mitchell 5 Spectacles of Otherness, Sexuality, and Space in 131 Guillermo Reyes’s Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives Ed Chamberlain 6 Composing and Performing the Self: 157 Double-Consciousness and Octavian Nothing Martin Woodside 7 Close Encounters and the Culture Industry: 185 The Rhetoric of Extraterrestrial Contact and Alien Abduction Narratives in the Twentieth Century Elizabeth Lowry iii Volume 4 · Number 2 · April 2014 CONTRIBUTORS Anna Jones Abramson is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently writing a dissertation entitled The Age of Atmosphere: Air, Affect, and Technology in Modernist Literature. She has published work in Emotion, the journal of the American Psychological Association, as well as Greater Good Magazine. Ed Chamberlain is a Lecturer in the Division of Culture, Art and Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. He completed his Ph.D. in American Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in 2012. In his research, he examines intermedial and textual portrayals of queer migrant people. He researches the storytelling of people that travel to the United States from the Caribbean and Latin America. This research considers how matters of ethnicity, race, and sexuality intersect in artistic representation. He has taught courses about the representation of families and masculinity in American literature and visual narratives. Mélanie Grué, Ph.D., is a temporary teaching and research fellow at Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne. Her fields of research include trauma literature, gender and queer studies, as well as feminist and queer visual arts. Her recent publications include “Trauma and Survival in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, or the Power of Alternative Stories” (in Trauma Narratives and Herstory, edited by Silvia Pellicer-Ortin & Sonya Andermahr, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and “‘Bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt’: Reclaiming the Female Body in Dorothy Allison’s Testimonial Writing” (National Taiwan University Studies in Language and Literature, 2013). Elizabeth Lowry received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Arizona State University where she now holds a Lecturer position in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests include nineteenth century studies, feminist historiography, sustainability, public spheres theory and material culture. Her published work appears in the Rhetoric Review, Aries, Word and Text, and in edited collections. iv Donna Mitchell is a final year Ph.D. student of Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. The title of her thesis is From Dolls to Demons: Tracing the Evolution of the Female Figure through a Selection of Traditional and Non-Traditional Gothic Texts. Her Master’s dissertation focused on the contemporary Gothic hero of Anne Rice’s work, and her conference papers have centered specifically on the Gothic female. Her work has been published online by the Sibéal Feminist and Gender Studies Network and the PG CWWN, and is included in the Rowman & Littlefield print publication of The Universal Vampire Series. Dr. Nevena Stojanovic is a Lecturer in the English Department at West Virginia University. Her research centers on presentations of Jewish identities in nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century transatlantic literature, nomadism and displacement, rearticulations of selfhood in contact zones, and the potential of radical performance art. She is working on a book that examines performances of Jewishness in non-Jewish American novels of the 1800s and early 1900s. Martin Woodside holds an MA in English from UC Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State, where he also earned a certificate of specialization in Children’s Literature. He spent 2009-10 as a Fulbright Fellow in Romania. Currently, Martin is a doctoral candidate and David Sengstack Fellow in the Childhood Studies Department at Rutgers-Camden. He is writing his dissertation on frontier mythology and American boyhood in the second half of the 19th century, which reflects his broader interests in constructions of boyhood and masculinity in Children’s Literature. v Introduction: Living Literary Others (and its Post-Linguistic Challenges) by Susan Yi Sencindiver By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. – Marcel Proust, Time Regained We can never escape ourselves; we can never know the other and perceive their universe from their point of view – except, according to Proust, through art. Through the imaginative power of literature, we can encounter the thoughts and emotions of another. Through the immersive nature of absorbed reading, we can put ourselves into the place of an other, whose environing and inner realities are capable of being experienced with a keen liveliness and palpable presence. And through the sensitive critical inquiry of narratives explored through the other’s eyes, as presented by the collection of articles in this issue, we may heed to the ways in which such seeing, sensing, and vividly living the lunar landscapes of literary others enhance an empathetic understanding of otherness. This Proustian conviction, however, meets opposition when taking into account the influential body of scholarship that has gravitated towards a notion of otherness as radically Other, unthinkable, unrepresentable, and resisting conceptualization. This body’s strong force of attraction has been exerted by thinkers Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 4 · Number 2 · April 2014 © The Author 2014. All rights reserved Otherness: Essays and Studies 4.2 such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, who, stressing the irreducibility of absolute otherness, exhort that the moment Otherness is articulated in positive terms it is drawn into the orbit of the self-same whereby its alterity is eclipsed (Levinas 1969, 121). Their caution is not unrelated to the debates on, for example, the limitations of an epistemological purview bounded by socio-culturally specific circumstances, the longstanding philosophical bugaboo of other minds consequent upon the impossibility of experiencing another’s experience – and this epistemic limit in accessing the minds, motives, and sensations of others, to rehearse a Freudian truism, includes our own as well. In this light, the claim of the unparalleled ability of fiction to voice, imaginatively enter, and vicariously live the affective, experiential, and mental lives of others is a false promise; disillusioned, we may question whether representation, let alone knowledge, of the other is possible, and whether such an endeavor is even ethical. Especially owing to Levinas’s ethical appreciation of otherness (1969) and Derrida’s re-reading of Levinasian ethics of hospitality (1999; 2000; 2001), otherness has been earmarked a cardinal ethical category. For Levinas and Derrida, the hospitality towards the other is unconditional, the ethical obligation infinite; and to prevent converting and vitiating the other, defined by and for itself, into an other- than-self, they contend that otherness must always be recognized as Altogether-Other. On these grounds, then, ethically relating to the other and the literary attempt to narrate, recognize, and understand the other are mutually exclusive courses of action since in the process of describing and grasping otherness, one is also producing it, reshaping it to reflect one’s own image. Tracing the conditions for the rise of human rights in the late eighteenth century, the cultural historian Lynn Hunt points to literature, reading novels in particular, as a formative force on account of its ability to produce “imagined empathy,” that is, to imagine that “someone else is like you” and 2 Introduction Susan Yi Sencindiver that “their inner experiences are like one’s own” (2007, 32, 39). Yet this faculty fostered by literature, following a Levinasian line of thought, would constitute an unethical act to the extent that such an empathic understanding presumes that the other is knowable, is like me, and subsumes the other to one’s own horizon of understanding: If grasped, the other would not be Other (1987, 90); and in sympathy “through which we put ourselves in the other’s place,” he warns, difference is annulled whereby the Other is merely known “as another (my)self, as the alter ego” (ibid., 75, 83). Against these critical efforts insisting on the absolute difference of otherness, its unethical and impossible representations, the contributions of this issue, in contrast, emphasize the political urgency, ethical imperatives, and new insights to be gained by doing precisely the opposite, but of course not without attendant dilemmas. Granted, the vigilance of subjectivist and constructivist stances is vital in order to detect the dangerous reductions and imperial assimilations of the other to the self; yet the unfortunate effect of this discursive turn in literary criticism is a paralyzing hermeneutic anxiety and deadlock: The critic is ever cautious yet inescapably guilty of violating the fragile singularity of the other, and ever conscious of the impasse of being restricted to, yet dependent on, contextually specific systems of understanding and reductive closures that are necessary to render possible any kind of meaning production, to render the literary other coherent even though this coherence is an imposed construct. In contrast, the collection of articles in this issue offers a refreshing antidote to the disabling inertia generated by the fear of reading the same into and thus infringing and distorting the other’s reality. Recognizing the fact of finite human understanding does not entail that we are blocked from any knowledge whatsoever or from partial and provisional understandings of the other; epistemic access is limited not 3 Otherness: Essays and Studies 4.2 prohibited. Yet precisely on account of the limited access to other minds, imagination becomes a precondition for empathy. This is what renders literature pertinent to studies on otherness: a quintessentially imaginative activity, literature and its unlimited range of characters accommodate a means to envision not only fictional others but also “what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours,” to momentarily plunge into other contexts removed spatially, temporally, and culturally from ours. Instead of seeing a single world, that of our own, Proust contends that it is by virtue of art, “we see it multiplied,” worlds “differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite” (1949, 247). This inextricable link between fictional characters and their worlds is taken up by Anna Jones Abramson’s “Authors and Others,” which considers the ways literature invites empathy not only by reading but writing it: the creation of a character involves not only the creation of their world but also the author’s transport to the space of the other’s experience. By putting Levinas as well as the scholarly accounts on otherness by Mikhail Bakhtin, Geoffrey Harpham, and Judith Butler, among others, into dialogue with J.M. Coetzee’s self-conscious novel Elizabeth Costello, Abramson’s article alternately queries, challenges, and elaborates upon the premises of aforesaid theories in an endeavor that reinvigorates the theoretical debates on the role of otherness in ethics. More specifically, by way of Elizabeth Costello’s self-reflexive contemplation on the relationship between an author and her literary character/s, Abramson considers this relationship as a productive prism by which to explore the precarious ethical encounter between self and other – not in terms of hospitality – but through an inverse ethical movement into foreign spaces, where the other is met on their own territory. Analyzing how authorship is consistently framed in spatial, sensuous, and kinetic terms, Abramson argues that authoring a character requires not merely imagining but radically inhabiting another 4