This article interrogates the poethical turn in the work of the later Levinas. In the first instance, this reading brings to the fore the extent to which Levinas’ early ethical position paradoxically repeats formerly deni­grated aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy. Secondly, through the aperture of Celan’s poetry, Levinas’ later ethical reformulation is examined. This article demonstrates that it is through a heightened attention to language that Levinas attempts to counter the tacit duplication of Heideggerian ideals. Crucially, this article seeks to establish that it is only when Levinas fully embraces the ‘poetry of language’ that the residual Heideggerian re-inscription is finally redressed; this process of redress being mediated via what Celan refers to as ‘the not-to-be-deciphered’ free-floating poetic word.

It is undeniable that aspects of postmodernist thought are also useful to the feminist goal of unseating the hegemonic dominance of traditional male authority. The threat of moral relativism hangs over the Postmodernist head, and this stance is strongly criticized within feminist circles: As Carol Gilligan has said,” Life can’t just be continually reconstructed; ...There is a complex reality, yes, but there is something called reality, and there is something called a you.” A postmodern feminism can cope with the collapsed notions of foundationalist premises, such as that of the stable and unified self-concept. This article makes an attempt at re-visiting feminist critic of science in light of phenomenological and hermeneutical attempts at bridging the gap between science and life either in the Husserlian project of restoring the structures of the Life World, or in the Heideggerian quest for liberating the ‘Being’ from the prison house of language. Do they share similar concerns for overcoming the limitations of binary structures of understanding? The article makes an attempt at understanding the one from the perspective of the other and vice versa.

In this paper I argue that the Heidegger of Being and Time is a dialogist, and ought to be situated in the tradition of other twentieth-century dialogists like Bakhtin and Gadamer. Specifically, I claim that Heidegger’s conceptions of the “Being-with,” “discourse,” and “solicitude” of Dasein in BT illustrate his endorsement of a conception of dialogicality. There are three advantages to proposing that Heidegger is a dialogist in BT. First, this paradigm offers a more perspicuous vocabulary for describing the discursive nature of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as a Being-with others. Second, it provides a better way of understanding the normative dimensions of “solicitude.” Lastly, it helps to underscore how Dasein’s identity remains social even in the seemingly individualizing moment of becoming authentic.

The aim of this article is to examine the ways Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dramatizes an existential crisis that is psychologically as well as politically underpinned. It explores how the novel is reflective of the ideological complexities of its day while also corresponding to current ideas in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind which examine the entanglements of embodied feelings, subjective sentience and the ability to narrativize experientiality in shared language. In investigating how the crisis of narration in Heart of Darkness is reflective of the psychological and existential alienation experienced by the protagonist in the novel, the article draws on debates on the role of the literary narrative as a vehicle to communicate the phenomenal quality of consciousness.

For over a century, critics have typically approached Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the perspective of its young governess, whose obsession with her charges and the spectral figures that allegedly haunt them ultimately leads to disaster, the death of Miles. This article, however, offers a reading atypical of those previously accomplished. Analyzing the novella from a psychoanalytic and narratological perspective, it argues for a shift in point of view, contending that the locus of the novel, the manuscript ostensibly documenting the harrowing experiences of the young governess, is not penned by a woman but rather by a man, the principle reader of the thing itself, Douglas. Given the shift in point of view, it becomes wholly evident that it is Douglas’s wildly erotic fantasy that becomes the substance of the manuscript, one culminating not in the death of a child but, rather, in the petite mort or the “little death” of sexual orgasm, the equivalent of a masturbatory episode on the child’s part while in the passionate embrace of his governess. Read in this manner, the narrative coheres as a young man’s romantic retrospective of desire, obsession and sexual initiation.

This essay offers a Schutzian reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, arguing that the so-called critical ambivalence in Chinua Achebe’s hermeneutic of the colonial experience makes sense if situated within his lived experiences in colonial Nigeria. Grounding its interpretation of Achebe’s meaning-making of the colonial experience in Schutz’s phenomenology, the essay begins with a close reading of the novel itself, highlighting significant areas of ambivalence. Next, it explicates Schutz’s (1967) constructs of intersubjectivity and phenomenology of literature. In the next section in which Achebe’s biography is examined, an attempt is made to show how a Schutzian reading of Achebe’s social relationships can help us understand his account of the colonial experience as represented in his first novel. Ultimately, the paper concludes by noting that the ambivalence that charactterizes Things Fall Apart reflects the author’s realism and investment in both the African and European cultures he sought to critique.

Laughter takes a great many forms in the novel of manners, signifying different things at different times for different characters in different situations. Linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, poetry, art, and film have all attempted to tackle the subject of laughter, yet in relation to manners, and the novel of manners, the matter remains fraught and underexplored. By examining laughter in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), this paper attempts to show how laughter on a micro level mirrors the simulacra and simulations that comprise manners, characters, and even the progression of the novel on a macro level. What the study of laughter in The Custom of the Country reveals about knowledge, sign systems, and commodity and exchange, could nuance the way in which we read laughter in the novel of manners, a type literature built upon knowing and understanding the conditions of the personal and social simultaneously.