The Mirror and the Killer-Queen Otherness in Literary Language [Paperback]

The book not only confirms the high ethical stakes in informed contemporary reading; it offers a rare readerly pleasure in... exploring the wider cultural significance of gender and the body and their narrative representation. Henry Sussman, SUNY-Buffalo

Gabriele Schwab revitalizes debates about literatures cultural function by exploring literary experience as an encounter with otherness. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, Schwab contends that literature facilitates contact with cultures that may seem foreign to us. At the same time, literature can render the familiar strange, and foreground what a culture tends to repress. At its best, literature challenges the very boundaries of the culture from which it emerges.

Schwabs readings of writers such as Hawthorne, Faulkner, Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Djuna Barnes, Marguerite Duras, and John Cage demonstrate the centrality of aesthetics and the literary to studies of otherness and cultural contact.

Preface
Acknowledgments

I. The Otherness of Poetic Language
1. Reading, Otherness, and Cultural Contact

II. Nonsense, Dream, and Chaos: The Otherness of Literary Language
2. Nonsense and Metacommunication: Reflections on Lewis Carroll
3. Joyce, Cage, and Chaos: Finnegans Wake, Roaratoria, and French Feminism

III. Witches, Mothers, and Male Fantasies: The Otherness of Woman
4. Seduced by Witches: Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter in the Context of New England Witchcraft Fictions
5. The Multiple Lives of Addie Bundrens Dead Body: On William Faulkners As I Lay Dying

IV. Trauma, Transgression, and Transference: The Otherness of Gender
6. Traversing Spaces of Otherness: Djuna Barness Nightwood
7. While She Lives She Invites Murder : On Marguerite Durass The Malady of Death

Notes
Works Cited
Index

GABRIELE SCHWAB is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Irvine.