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THE REPRESENTATION OF ALTERITY IN LITERATURE USING FOCALISATION INFANTICIDE FROM SETHES POINT OF VIEW IN BELOVED How can certain novels represent what seems unspeakable in other discourses? How can 'the other' be portrayed in fiction when this seems impossible in other types of texts? This article examines how some literary texts succeed in discussing taboo subjects that can or may not be articulated in non-fiction. Not the why, but rather the how is emphasized: the focus is on the form of literary texts, more so than on the sociological characteristics of the literary field. 20th-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' concepts 'other' and 'alterity' are essential for the analysis of the way in which the other can be represented in fiction. Though Levinas seems wary towards art and image-making, I argue that, due to the use of literary techniques such as focalization, certain works of literature can offer an insight into the mind of the other that Levinas views as fundamentally impenetrable. Literary critic Derek Attridge claims otherness to be at stake in every literary work: he states that alterity is an important quality of literature and that fiction is the ideal place to represent the other adequately and respectfully. Beloved, the renowned 1987 novel by African-American author Toni Morrison, represents alterity in a manner that seems unconceivable in other discourses. Morrison's decision to offer readers a glimpse into the thoughts of protagonist Sethe in the scene where she kills her baby is controversial precisely because the internal focalization reduces the seemingly unbridgeable distance to the other - in casu a mother committing infanticide - so profoundly. Literary critic Adam Zachary Newton too claims that particular narrative texts can come close to the immediacy of an actual ethical encounter with the other in real life. This article analyses the narrative techniques used in the novel to describe ineffable experiences, in casu focalization in a pivotal scene from Beloved. Arguably the specificity of literature lies partly in the way literature is 'other' and how it represents alterity. Not only the pleasant and the agreeable can be represented in literature, but also the indescribable, the inconceivable and the horrible. The novel Beloved does not seem to eschew the taboo of infanticide, but in fact attempts to represent that which cannot and may not be represented. Word count: 10.355 words

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This thesis sets out to probe two extremely polarised American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, in light of the 'mythological' tensions between the American expatriate and a European space of bohemian Paris, via the mediation of the 'thinghood' of material artefacts imbedded in that space. Taking into consideration how the trope of the 'American in Paris' has led to an autonomous 'cultural subgenre' in its own, we will merge two branches of critical theory into a comprehensive methodological model, in order to analyse more closely the intricacies of (hyphenated) Trans-Atlantic mythmaking in Henry James's 'The Ambassadors' (1903) and Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' (1934). By hybridsing Roland Barthes's structuralist paradigm of semiotic myths with Bill Brown's notion of 'uncanny fetishism' (either through 'prosopopeia' or poetic reification), we are enabled to more penetratively explore the ideological and psychoanalytic depths of an American imagination vis-à-vis the Alterity of Parisian (artefactual) space. Dispensing with 'the decorative display of what goes-without-saying' of a mythical Paris as exoticist commonplace, this theoretical blend between mythology, 'thing theory', and expatriate transculturalism allows us to perceive how pre-eminent cosmopolitan sites are transformed into meta-physical essences for national self-invention, on the basis of the 'defamiliarising' 'thingification' and de-commodification of culturally fixed objects. More specifically, we shall examine the interplay between two semiological chains of 'linguistic' objects and mythological 'things' (as well as a third one of 'counter-myth') in aforementioned literary works. Our reading selection relies entirely on the diversified workings of myth both novels insidiously exhibit: while both migrant narratives display focalising reference points of an American consciousness that distorts an artefactual Paris ('things') as the Emersonian realm for spiritual or physical emancipation ('myths'), Jamesian heterodiegetic narration satirises transcultural miscommunication by 'artificially' imploding myth from within, whereas Miller's autodiegetic narration further exploits mythological fallacies through Transcendentalist bio-politics and his ideal of the 'inhuman'. Interrelating mythological fetishism with the author's idiosyncratic poetics - respectively those of epistemological uncertainty and solipsistic self-revelation - we come to the conclusion how James's satire on Franco-American culture sabotages his protagonist's de-historicisation of Paris as Emersonian fantasy of 'things', while Miller's Whitmanesque relationships with 'things' conceal his affirmation of cultural hierarchy between the Old and the New World, under the guise of undermining those cultural boundaries through sexual collectivity.

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Because of the tendencies of traditional elegiac conventions toward sublimation, self-discovery, intellectual harmony, and unified harmonious nature, elegies, though not as formally restricting as other genres such as sonnets, are still accompanied by a particular set of expectations. Specifically, elegies suggest first, the occasion of an experience of loss that will be addressed through thematic elements; and second, a shape that moves from A to not A, which echoes the mourning rituals from which the elegiac tradition derives. In the imagined liminal space their event generates, rituals perform transformationthat is to say, they begin in one place, A, and end in another place, not A. So too the shape of elegy engenders expectations that the poem will move sequentially from grief, or the address of some loss, to consolation. As such, the works we shall explore in this study complicate traditional attitudes toward consolation as a function of elegy. In doing so, they engage traditional tropes, both formally and thematically, in order to revise and, consequently, renew one's assesment of them. Moreover, such engagement exerts pressure on the structural generative principle of elegies as works of mourning that move from grief to consolation. It will thus be useful for our investigation to consider what sort of closure modern elegies enact by attending to the formal, thematic movements, and moods of the texts to be discussed. We will then be in a better position to consider the relation between the elegy and therapeutic attitudes as well as the affects associated with the human experience of loss. A historical study of the development of elegy as a genre and concomitantly, elegiac attitudes from their inception until the present day is vastly beyond the scope of this study. Here, we limit our investigation to a few works that engage with the literary elegiac from the twentieth century. (Because the development of psychoanalysis has generated certain therapeutic attitudes toward affects associated with loss, and because literary and critical texts written in the elegiac mode often allude to or explicitly employ some of the psychoanalytic concepts that engender these attitudes, it will be important to consider the ways in which they interact with literary texts.

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Walther Rheiner (1895-1925) could be counted among second-ranked writers of the German Expressionism. In a quantitative comparison with luminaries of the artistic movement, such as Georg Heym or Georg Trakl, Rheiner did not produce any enormous corpus of texts. His whole oeuvre can be estimated approximately at 80 poems and 50 pages of prosaic fragments. However the author succeeded to bring out only in one year - 1918 - four poetry collections and one novella, his artistic career as his whole life fell prey to drugs - morphine and cocaine. The writer became forgotten very quickly and just in the 60's there was set off a process of rediscovering Rheiner (Rheiner Archive in West-Berlin). The main focus in the reception was clearly put on drugs which were both an element of the prose texts and supposedly a stimulus for writing poetry. The attention for drugs abuse was being expressed by composition of a couple of anthologies published by different editors (Thomas Rietzschel, Micheal Grimm, Appolion Verlag), in which the central place were occupied by the novella Kokain depicting the miserable history of a young junky artist Tobias. Recently, there have been released two critical works (Jeanine Atai, Richard Millington), that scrutinise Rheiner's texts in terms of drug literature and the artistic movement intrinsic to his aesthetics. Having shortly discussed problems of drug literature as an artistic phenomenon and a cultural history of two drugs concerned in the case of Rheiner, I attempt to reread three prose texts (Der Tod des Schwärmers Gautier Femin, Kokain, Die Erniedrigung) which display drugs abuse. By deploying the concept of flânerie I would like to reveal a more critical aspect of Rheiner's literary description of narcotics. I have coined a term of flânerie à rebours that allows me examine the vision of a modern metropolis and its society weaved into the prose by the German author. The junky flaneur represents to some extent his own antithesis - he is no more a symbolical master of the metropolis streets but stands as a victim in the centre of an urban voyeuristic spectacle. This reversal of roles notwithstanding, the flaneur proceed to divulge logic of the modern urban society governed by certain symbolical and economical rules.