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Schwarz-Bart, Levinas, and Post-Shoah–Postcolonial Gendered Ethics
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2014
- pp. 767-795
- 10.1353/mfs.2014.0048
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article examines the influence of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethical aspects of the life and work of André Schwarz-Bart. The essay is framed through recent re-interest in Schwarz-Bart’s collaborative works with his wife, Simone, as a bridge between Holocaust and postcolonial studies. The publications, arguments, and key points of intersubjective ethics in Levinas’s work that Schwarz-Bart encountered are carefully examined. The argument confronts the critical reception of Levinas’s concepts of the feminine and dwelling to demonstrate how, when seen through a Judaic lens, these notions form a new gendered reading of Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just.