Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2021
Abstract
Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), are two of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century. Their contested and exhaustive critical reception suggests that readers continue to be hailed by these texts in complex ethical ways. In each text, a white male protagonist engages in a violent encounter with an individual identified as Other. If they initially arouse discomfort by appearing to divest others of their alterity, these characters ultimately recognize and preserve that otherness, inviting readers to consider the requirement that we privilege others over ourselves in order to become subjects.
Included in
French and Francophone Literature Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 67, no. 4, Winter 2021.