Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel

Lithuanian-born French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that the ethical, rather than the metaphysical, is the foundational position for human subjectivity, and that conflictual human subjectivity underlies all Western philosophy, says Molinaro. She shows how his work is intimately relevant to the global resurgence of interest in ethics as well as to the nexus between ethics, temporality, and narrative fiction in contemporary Spain. Her topics are ethics, alterity, and Levinas; Spain's generation X; repeating the same violence, or the failure of synchrony; the betrayal of diachrony, and diachrony and saying. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain; and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. This book studies Levinas, ethics, and these contemporary Spanish writers who trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.