Levinas and the Other in Narratives of Facial Disfigurement

Download or read book Levinas and the Other in Narratives of Facial Disfigurement written by Gudrun Grabher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering readings of a range of fictional and biographical texts, including work by Richard Selzer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gaston Leroux, Willa Cather, Natalie Kusz, and Lucy Grealy, this book examines reactions to facially disfigured people on the basis of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the face. Drawing on Levinas’ concern with the holistic dimension of the face as an encounter with the other’s "whole person" and the sense of moral obligation that this instils in us—a sense that disfigurement disrupts by drawing our attention to the disfigurement as a "spectacle" and threatening to limit our view of that individual—the author explores how we react to the facially disfigured and how we ought to react.