• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1013-1034
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• 2009

The space of the Other assumes the space of Barthes's multiplicity and Foucault's transdiscursive position, and, therefore, aims at becoming the locus in which the speaking subject and the hearing subjects are supposed to communicate and constitute as if they were situated in the pscychoanalytic session. However, the wall of untranslatibility across language and cultures still exist there in the space of the Other in the form of trauma and aggressivity, as Lacan demonstrate perceptively through the reading of Kant avec Sade. In short, Lacan regards the moral commandment (to love one's neighbor as oneself) as the obstacle in the Freud's myth of transgression, and interprets this in terms of the emergence of the Other. Freud understands that the aggressivity in the subject's own heart was inherent in all humans, and that one's neighbor would be evil. Lacan goes beyond Freud and articulates that the aggressivity in the imaginary relation with the Other in the mirror stage insures that an evil inheres in the very being of humanity. A global phenomenon of the diasporic identities and hybridity, the phenomenon which has been represented by the complicated intermixture of terms which span from diaspora, postcolonialism, postnationalism. and transnationalism can be clarified, if they are put in the context of the ethics of Othering or becoming the Other. The ethics of Othering presupposes the situation in which the diasporic subjects encounter the lack of the cross-cultural negotiation and communication. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the poetics of Other and the logic of the ethics of Othering can explain the postmodern or transmodern world which has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational as well as how one can encounter the results of diasporic and postcolonial double consciousness, a consciousness which is a discursive category for multicultural or cross-cultural, focusing on the concept of liminality/interstitiality

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

In The Great Hunger (1942) Patrick Kavanagh opens an Irish postnationalist discourse. Taking advantage of historical revisionism and postcolonialism, he not only demystifies a romantic nationalist ideology rooted in rural Ireland but also searches for an autonomous literary tradition free of the Irish Literary Revival, supposedly an outcome of a colonial influence. As a farmer-poet, Kavanagh deconstructs in two ways myths of rural areas, to which the Revivalists aspire. Contrary to Revivalism, he reveals that rural Ireland is not an idealized place where national identity arises and individual spirits are restored. It is instead a cruel place where farmer Maguire, deprived of health, wealth, and love, is tortured by hard labor in the field, moral regulations imposed by the Church, and his mother's domestic authority, all of which leave him unmarried until age sixty-five. Kavanagh also challenges the Revivalist tradition, led by W. B. Yeats commonly referred to as the poet of the nation, by indicting its reliance on former colonial authority and its lack of a sense of communal autonomy, both of which are diagnosed as "provincialism" by Kavanagh. Given that modern Irish literature has been strongly colored as nationalistic during the course of anticolonial resistance, Kavanagh's critique of the Revival in The Great Hunger, whose proponents blindly beautify the lives of farmers, runs directly against the grain of the founding ideology of the Irish nation-state. His voice, like that of a whistle-blower, disclosing the harsh realities of rural Ireland, ushers in a "post"-nationalist perspective on nation and national myths in Irish poetics.