In my graduation thesis, through my intimate process of reading Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, I explore therelationship to the other/Other I encounter in it. To facilitate the description of the process, I briefly introduce the disciplines that deal with otherness and cite some theorists, such as Virk, Lévinas, Ricoeur, Freud,
Spivak, Said, Waldenfels, and Jung, who research, define, and contextualise these concepts in accordance with their field of research. I also offer a rough historical overview of dealing with the other/Other – this serves primarily to raise awareness of the long-standing effort to clarify this elusive notion and the impossibility of definitively containing it. In addition to the above terms, I also touch on terms such as literariness and universality, as I often use them to express the feelings that
reading has opened to me. I want to emphasise that the purpose of the thesis is to take stock of the intimate process of reading and to find answers to the title question How to Be with the Other? in the literary work itself, not in theory. For this purpose, to come to life as effectively and clearly as possible, I consciously chose a more poetic discourse and used the theory only in places where I considered it necessary. This work is thus a swing in the direction of emphasising the greatness of literary works, which is manifested primarily in how they can deeply touch and thoroughly transform the reader, helping him or her to learn how to be with all that represents otherness—both the most insignificant and the most radical one. My way of writing my thesis is an invitation to all students of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory to allow themselves more intimacy and poetics in their
diploma theses, thus honouring the efforts of literary sciences and to consciously explore and thoroughly articulate how literature touches them and why this study is important and worthwhile.
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