The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
-
Jean-Michel Ganteau
Abstract
This article purports to demonstrate that romance is characterised by a natural affinity with the expression of an ethics of alterity on account of its reliance on the presentation of paroxystic affect. It engages with a series of texts belonging to the canon of contemporary fiction and uses critical and theoretical material concerning romance as mode and the Levinasian ethics of alterity. By successively analysing romance as the privileged locus of the presentation of the other, as the site where the openness of the present is performed and which allows for the disarticulating power of the event, the article argues in favour of the status of romance as operator of exteriority.
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
- Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
- Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
- Irreversibility
- Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
- The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
- Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
- Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
- The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
- Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
- Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
- Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
- Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
- On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
- Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
- Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
- Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
- Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
- Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
- Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
- Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
- Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
- Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
- Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
- Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
- Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
- Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
- Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
- Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
- Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
- Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
- Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
- Irreversibility
- Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
- The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
- Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
- Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
- The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
- Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
- Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
- Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
- Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
- On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
- Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
- Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
- Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
- Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
- Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
- Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
- Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
- Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
- Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
- Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
- Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
- Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
- Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
- Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
- Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
- Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
- Eingegangene Schriften