Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language Through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prévost and Graffigny

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Rodopi, 2003 - 312 pàgines
Encounters with the Other brings together a range of eighteenth-century texts in which the exploration of lingua incognita figures as a prominent topos . Drawing mostly on a corpus of French texts, but also including a number of works in English, Martin Calder attempts to realign well-known texts with more canonically marginalized works. The originality of the perspectives offered by this book lies in the comparative reading of works not previously conjoined. Encounters with otherness are marked by a transgression of the limits of language, occurring when language becomes alien or unfamiliar. Alterity may take various forms: a foreign language, a familiar language marked by the traits of foreignness, something unrecognizable as language, or even one's own language breaking down, as in madness. Unfamiliar language may be produced by a foreigner, by a child who cannot yet speak, in extreme cases by something unrecognizably human, in all cases by an agency somehow marked by difference. Narratives of encounters with otherness have written into them narratives of the discovery of the self. Implicitly informed by the reading techniques associated with literary theory, Encounters with the Other offers an insightful commentary on issues surrounding colonialism, cultural difference, gender and the importance of language to identity. Martin Calder's work challenges certain Eurocentric notions and exposes the problematic links between Enlightenment rationality and colonial expansion. This book is of interest both to undergraduate students and to academic researchers, and to a more general readership concerned with understanding the relationship between Europe, the 'West' and a wider world.

Des de l'interior del llibre

Continguts

Acknowledgements
9
The Speciousness of Origins
21
The Infant Other Feral Children and Civil Children
77
Tropic Alterities Tropical Territories Lingual
139
The Encounter
146
Naming the Cannibals
158
Resistance and Mimicry
167
Vendredi
176
Fantasy and Infantilization The Abbé Prévosts
187
Renaming the Concubine
204
Language and SelfAffirmation
229
Dividing Language
243
The Origin of Drawing
256
Bibliography
271
Index of Names
303
Copyright

Reading Positions
185

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Passatges populars

Pàgina 167 - I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty; — Seb.
Pàgina 167 - Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate...
Pàgina 55 - Two savages, who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language, by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects.
Pàgina 148 - I could think of; and he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every ten or twelve steps, in token of acknowledgment for saving his life. I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckoned to him to come still nearer. At length he came close to me, and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head. This, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever.
Pàgina 250 - Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.
Pàgina 135 - Emile n'apprendra jamais rien par cœur, pas même des fables, pas même celles de la Fontaine, toutes naïves, toutes charmantes qu'elles sont; car les mots des fables ne sont pas plus les fables que les mots de l'histoire ne sont l'histoire.
Pàgina 169 - GOD having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity, to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words.
Pàgina 61 - The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet ; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them.
Pàgina 175 - At his first coming on board us, he had so much forgot his language, for want of use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seemed to speak his words by halves.
Pàgina 118 - I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

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