The current paper aims to illustrate how Michel Houellebecq's prose revolves around the failure of otherness. His character, always male, is in search of indemnifying options to rebuild the connections that have been suddenly interrupted, such as miscarriages or losing partners due to suicide. At first sight, the woman's figure naturally meets these requirements. Otherness is being reduced to a barren body, that acts as an extension of the traditional female role: woman as an erotic partner and maternal figure....   ⇨ Read more

The present paper participates in the discussion about the differences between masculine and feminine modes of travel in terms of interests, perception, and representation, by exploring the Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. As a traveller, Lady Mary engaged in the contemplation of cultural landscapes: she attempted to understand the social logic of the communities she met and to assess the cultural distance...   ⇨ Read more

The main purpose of the present study is to detect and portray the way in which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari aligned their views with a movement of annihilation of the self-otherness equation. It also tackles with the explanation of the concept of transindividuality, by which the overtaking of the polarised obsession of the ipseity-alterity definition is proposed. This concept encapsulates both a space of indeterminacy of identity and the incorporation of the multiple alterity – the collective. The present...   ⇨ Read more

The present paper, drawing mainly on the findings of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Richard Kearney, aims to explore the complex framing as subalterns undergone by Spike, the obscenely beautiful Robo sapiens of Jeanette Winterson‘s The Stone Gods, as well as Sonmi-451, one of the ascended fabricants or cognitively awakened clones in the service industry of David Mitchell‘s Cloud Atlas. There is an inherent paradox here: if these posthumans are both posterior and superior, what makes it possible to...   ⇨ Read more

As a literary genre, the travel literature was considered a literary hybrid made of several other sub-genres, or a literary sub-species made of the autobiographic writings (Paul Fussell) or of the ethnographic writings (Patrick Holland). Being defined on several axes, such as fiction/non-fiction literature, internal/external travels, poetical/historical form, time/space perspective, the travel writings differ not only in terms of narrative strategies but also in terms of method or purpose of writing. The travel...   ⇨ Read more

The author’s intention is to analyse the themes of madness and imagination as means of world-making and mediators between them in Cervantes’ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. The premise of the central argument is that each of Cervantes’ characters relate to the world through their own imagination. The first conclusion generated by this hypothesis is that Don Quixote himself deliberately makes up his world and defines himself as an archetype. This paper proposes a classification of three...   ⇨ Read more