Looking Through the Eyes of the Other
Sartrean Reader Consciousness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7165010 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexandra Kurmann (0000-0001-6782-7545, Macquarie University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 281-302 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-11677679 |
| OpenAlex | W4411477280 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
This article applies Jean-Paul Sartre's proposition in Being and Nothingness of “the Look” (le regard) to the context of fiction, offering a phenomenological perspective on why bibliophiles sense they inhabit the world of the text. Contributing to an Other-centered ethics identified in contemporary narrative theory, the author argues that Looking through the eyes of the narrator affords textual encounters that prioritize the experiences of Others to produce ethically involved readers. Through the Look, Sartre theorizes a commonly accepted dyadic structure of human relations that alienates self from Other. He proposes that a mutual process of objectification occurs when we hold each other's gaze, which prevents us from knowing the Other. However, the imaginative displacement inherent in reading first-person fiction resolves this standoff, allowing us to say I and yet mean another. Applying the Look to reading, the author analyzes Nina Bouraoui's intersectional novel Garçon manqué (Tomboy: A Novel; 2000), whose narrator is Othered as Algerian French, queer, and gender nonconforming. The strategic use of narration devices induces reader experiences of the Look and invites embodiment of the I-figure, activating reader consciousness, a sentient engagement with the narrating Other, for whom the reader develops a Levinasian sense of responsibility
Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Linguistics · Narrative · Nothing · Objectification · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · French Literature and Criticism · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
Cartesian Meditations
The Ethics of Storytelling
How Infants Know Minds
The Implied Reader
Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology
Hooked by the Mouth”
Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging
Not for profit
Phenomenology of Perception
The Rise of the “We” Narrator in Modern American Fiction
(Post)Colonial We-Narratives and the "Writing Back" Paradigm
Being and Nothingness
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |