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Over the last decade, the various fields subsumed under the rubric of “cultural studies” have centered increasingly on narrative representations of otherness and on how those representations might affect attitudes toward “others” on a psychological and a cultural level. Yet few books have explored the cultural functions of literature as a specifically aesthetic practice as subtly and suggestively as Gabriele Schwab's The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language. The first of two projected volumes, The Mirror and the Killer-Queen is chiefly concerned with three kinds of literary alterity: figurations of women as other, figurations of otherness along gender boundaries, and the otherness of literary language itself vis à vis other discourses. In Schwab's intriguing hypothesis, encounters with otherness in literature effect a powerful and salutary intervention in our relations with otherness in the extraliterary world. The first chapter provides a brief yet useful and wide-ranging survey of theories—psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, cultural, and French feminist, among others— that treat reading as an encounter with alterity. Drawing on this bricolage of approaches, Schwab proceeds to articulate her own psychoanalytic “ethnography of reading” based on theories of “cultural contact” and “transference.” The remainder of the book comprises six essays on the following texts: Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, John Cage's Roaratorio, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and Marguerite Duras's The Malady of Death.
According to Schwab, literary texts facilitate “cultural contact” in two registers: intercultural and intracultural. Reading Shakespeare is an instance of intercultural contact, in Schwab's view, for it entails our encountering the historical otherness of Elizabethan language and culture. In the process, we are compelled to seek for something within that otherness that we can respond t