The encounter of the face: Emmanuel Levinas and Barbara Gowdy's "We so seldom look on love"

• Autores: Michael Trussler
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / coord. por Gema Soledad Castillo García, María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Vincent Carlisle Espínola, 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 951-960
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Susan Lohafer offers that short fiction fundamentally “shows us someone either coming home or leaving home”. This astute observation can be further honed; that is, the short story’s most primary existential concern takes place within the encounter between two (or more) people when they are exposed to the nudity of each other’s face. From such classic short fiction such as Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” to the contemporary “We So Seldom Look on Love” by Barbara Gowdy, short stories have pivoted on this primordial visual exchange.

    Emmanuel Levinas’s writing provides short story scholars with a philosophical vantage point with which to investigate this motif. Gowdy’s story exemplifies the facial encounter, death and privacy as a radical mode of being with its depiction of a female necrophile. By considering Gowdy’s story via Levinas, this paper will make a foray into short story poetics that will extend the work already developed by Lohafer, María Jesús Henráez Lerena, and Charles E. May.