Camus, encounters, reading

pp. 64-85

in: Colin Davis, Ethical issues in twentieth-century French fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

The remaining chapters of this book are concerned with the ways in which a variety of literary texts describe and stage encounters — or failed encounters — with alterity. This may entail tacit aggressions and gestures of mastery directed at the elusive, fragile and invulnerable Other, and at the text's implied reader, who actualizes the Other's alienating gaze in the process of reading. This and the following chapters discuss how such tacit aggressions may betray a more hostile relation to alterity than attitudes foregrounded within the texts, or authors' recorded views, would lead us to expect. Altericide frequently seems to be humanism's reverse side, and perhaps its occluded foundation.