The Other in literature?

Question

Where can I find information concerning the role of the Other in literature. Even a basic definition would help, but I would also love to find something describing the traits of the archetype.

Answer 1

Otherness is not unique to literature. In literature, it may refer to centrality and it's others eg western literary canon as opposed to non -literary texts ie otherness. In strict terms, it is an attempt to marginalize a logocentric idea that prides itself as supreme yet infested by the germs of its own rupture.

The quality or condition of being other or different, especially if exotic or strange: “We're going to see in Europe … religion, royalty, picturesqueness, otherness” (Anatole Broyard).



Otherness
Otherness (alterity) is a logical and metaphysical concept of considerable generality that would not ordinarily be included in a dictionary of psychoanalysis if, together with the concepts of the Big Other and the small other, Jacques Lacan had not taken Freud's ideas as far as he did and if contemporary French psychoanalysis had not been so enamored of the philosophical and moral system proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. In Plato's Sophist, the "other" is one of the first five kinds (along with existence, rest, motion, and sameness). For Hegel, to the extent that the first moment of every being-there contains its own negation, alterity can be considered as the engine of dialectical movement. In a different register, the Christian tradition, reformulated by Kant, conceives the categorical imperative of morality as the commandment that requires us to treat others not simply as means but as ends. We can also consider the concept of alterity as one of the foundations of ethics. But there is little sign of Freud in this, and we would be assigning psychoanalysis a task of considerable ambition if we were to look within it for the solution to these philosophical and moral problems.

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Good luck