Facing the Other to Death
Facing the Other to Death

Summary/Abstract: Reconsidering Joseph Conrad’s, E. M. Forster’s, and D. H. Lawrence’s hermeneutic hesitations, this paper proposes that the rejection of inherited epistemology traceable in their texts carries an existential risk and points out that already modernism thought itself an inadequate approach to the other. Conceptualized as not-me, utterly unapproachable by means through which I know I am, the other becomes synonymous with death. In approaching the amoral geographical phenomena of the other, the texts of all the three travellers abound with strikingly similar imagery, of holes and reptiles, which is intrinsically abhorrent in Euro-Christian signification. In addition, the otherness unbearable to the accessible literary medium and the deceptiveness of the symbolical exchange are pointed out, in all the three cases, by sudden textual ruptures.

• Details
• Contents