Figures of Alterity: French Realism and Its Others - Hardcover

"This complex and deep book, the result of a great deal of careful reflection, opens a perspective on realism that differs from those in the existing critical literature. The notion of alterity allows the author to bring together texts from different moments in the tradition of realism and to establish a new and original commonality among them. The range of the book's argument, its sweep, is impressive, and it will stimulate debate and provoke fruitful scholarly reactions." -David Bell,Duke University

This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an oppositional pair.