EBOOK Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling

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.