Otherness and Authority

Abstract

Comparing literatures and cultures provides perspectives on a person’s own language, culture, and nation. It allows for a deeper knowledge of self and social context, so it is as self-regarding as it is altruistic. All of us are other to ourselves, so that our personal pasts and the past of our language, culture, and nation, with all their changes and shifting configurations, tell us about ourselves. They also discipline or ironize, some might say relativize, ourselves and, paradoxically, put us all into relief and keep us from narcissism or solipsism. The classical past, the expansion of Europe, the Reformation, and the various revolutions and evolutions since then help us to read our present without being presentist. The Viking expansion, which also included the Norman Conquest of 1066, is a great force in Europe and the New World (Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland). Moreover, the quest for a trading route to Asia by sea, which included the expansion of Portugal into Africa, then Brazil and India, as well as Columbus’s westward enterprise, was as crucial an event as there was in the history of globalization. Ultimately, the move from the biological order to the industrial one, based on fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and gas, revolutionalized the world and transformed the face of the earth even more than the agricultural revolution 10,000 years before. This is one way to explain why I speak about earlier periods in my discussions of literature, theory, and history and, more particularly, about otherness and authority here.