Title: Discoveries of the other
First published: 1994
Description: Winfried Siemerling examines alterity in the work of four innovative postmodern authors, exploring self and other as textual figures of the unknown. Subjectivity appears mediated, in these texts, by a self-reflexive work in language, seeking to grasp itself in relation to a significant and often fascinating, but also enigmatic, other. Siemerling notes that the question of the other constitutes the opening or gap of knowledge that sets the texts in motion.

Because the other shows a marked tendency to escape conclusive definition, however, an articulation of the limits of knowledge becomes the condition under which the discovering subject itself apprehends its own precarious being.

The texts examined open the space between 'heterological' and 'thetic' moments of alterity. Siemerling explores Cohen's ways of eluding the self-imprisonment of a subject that names and defines the other. Cohen also uses ironic strategies in which the speaking 'I' turns against both itself and the addressee in order to confound thetic certainties.

Hubert Aquin's work, responding to a Sartrean concept of alterity and the discourses of decolonization influenced by it, negotiates a historically defined Quebecois experience of domination by the other. The self-reflexive discoveries of the other in Michael Ondaatje's texts follow elusive figures that often appear adumbrated in the margins of history. In the domain of gender and sexuality, Nicole Brossard's texts similarly engage the double problematic of thetic alterity and heterology.

Siemerling concludes that the works under consideration offer heterological discoveries that maintain a productive 'negativity' (Kristeva) with respect to given knowledge and fixed articulations of self and other.
Subjects: Canadian fiction, Canadian literature, Criticism and interpretation, Difference (Psychology) in literature, French-Canadian literature, History and criticism, Outsiders in literature, Postmodernism (Literature), Psychological aspects, Psychological aspects of Canadian literature, Self in literature, Ondaatje, michael, 1943-, Literature, modern, history and criticism, 20th century, Criticism and interpretationcohen, leonard , 1934-2016, Criticism and interpretationaquin, hubert , 1929-1977, Criticism and interpretationondaatje, michael , 1943-, Criticism and interpretationbrossard, nicole, Canadian fiction--history and criticism, Canadian fiction--20th century--history and criticism, French-canadian literature--history and criticism, French-canadian literature--20th century--history and criticism, Postmodernism (literature)--canada, Canadian literature--psychological aspects, Pr9192.6.o87 s54 1994, 813/.5409353
Places: Canada
People: Hubert Aquin (1929-1977), Leonard Cohen (1934-), Michael Ondaatje (1943-), Nicole Brossard
Time periods: 20th century