
The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity
New Perspectives on Genre Literature
Sandrine Sorlin(Author)
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published on 4. August 2015
Book
Hardback
190 pages
978-1-4438-7202-7 (ISBN)
Description
This volume focuses on language and ethics in literary genres, such as dystopia, science fiction, and fantasy, that depict encounters with alterity. Indeed, so-called "genre literature" embodies a heuristic model that dramatizes and exacerbates these encounters by featuring exotic, subhuman or post-human beings that defy human knowledge, elements particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. These genres have often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting its scope to a hollow and servile repetition of genre codes. This volume shows unequivocally that this field does lend itself to such reflections. The contributors to this book highlight genre literature's defamiliarising power, through which things can be "seen". In meta-conceptualising the relationship between language and reality, it problematises and enhances this relation by making it more easily perceivable. The book shows that, rather than contenting itself with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the boundary between the readerly and the writerly. In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how can what escapes humanity be described in human language? How can human language represent things that have no known referent in the reader's world of experience? This collection of essays reveals that the most prototypical traits of genre literature lie in the encounter with otherness and the linguistic issues this raises.
More details
Edition
Unabridged edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
Unabridged edition
Product notice
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 212 mm
Width: 148 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4438-7202-7 (9781443872027)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Unknown | Maylis Rospide | Sandrine Sorlin
Ethics and Poetics of Alterity
New Perspectives on Genre Literature
E-Book
09/2015
1st Edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€146.99
Available for download
Persons
Maylis Rospide is Senior Lecturer at Paul Valery University, Montpellier. Her major research interests include post-human theory and fiction, genre literature, ethics, and the concept of norms.Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Aix-Marseille University and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). She works on topics that cross linguistics, literature and the philosophy of language.