Levinas and the Other in Narratives of Facial Disfigurement: Singing through the Mask

Offering readings of a range of fictional and biographical texts, including work by Richard Selzer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gaston Leroux, Willa Cather, Natalie Kusz, and Lucy Grealy, this book examines reactions to facially disfigured people on the basis of Emmanuel Levinas ethics of the face. Drawing on Levinas concern with the holistic dimension of the face as an encounter with the others whole person and the sense of moral obligation that this instils in usa sense that disfigurement disrupts by drawing our attention to the disfigurement as a spectacle and threatening to limit our view of that individualthe author explores how we react to the facially disfigured and how we ought to react.