The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature

If we have established that our approach to the phenomena that are other to us is always a matter of semiosis, and that even in an attempt to naturalize phenomenology, like the one made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who points to the corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, it appears that our most negligible movements present our cultural being or habituality (cf. Iris Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 1990, 2005). However, many thinkers have claimed (for example, the novelist D. H. Lawrence or philosopher Luce Iragary) that we know by touch and intuition. The papers collected in this book examine our approach to these issues in an essentially post-theory world, particularly enquiring if twentieth century theory has left us clear directions of where we are supposed to be looking for new ways of understanding and representing the phenomenological. The way the Other exists in the consciousness that, as Hegel said, always pursues its death, becomes especially interesting in the context of the development of Anglo-American studies in the post-postmodern world which sees the West as a changeable cultural (and geographical) concept that incorporates a multiplicity of others. Yet, at the same time, a number of contemporary Anglo-American writers insists on the prolonged effects of colonialism in the modern world, in which outbursts of violence and hatred aimed at the Other prove that the modern world still cannot approach the Other without bigotry.