Book description
The telling of tales is always a troubling business. In telling stories
about ourselves and about others, we are always at risk of betraying
ethics. Troubled Tales explores the troubling nature of storytelling
through a reading of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas himself had a
complex relationship with literature. At times in his work, he is a
teller of powerful stories about ethics; at other times he disavows
storytelling altogether on ethical grounds.
Troubled Tales explores the tensions that lie in Levinas's relationship
with storytelling and literature. By exploring the ways that Levinas
tells and untells his stories, and by risking the telling of tales that
Levinas himself does not dare to tell, this book opens up new ways of
thinking about Levinas's ethics of responsibility. It may be, as Levinas
argues, that storytelling presents us with ethical dangers. But at the
same time, Troubled Tales makes the case that an ethics of
responsibility may demand that we continually seek out new stories to
tell about ourselves, about others and about the world. Will
Buckingham is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at De Montfort
University, Leicester, UK. In addition to philosophy, he also writes
fiction.
