My sixth book, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Duke University Press, 2012) is a reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers’ empathy. I ask what happens if–amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization–we continue the tradition of valorizing literature for bringing the lives of others to us, admitting them into our world and valuing the difference that they introduce into our lives? In this new historical situation, are we not forced to determine how much otherness is acceptable, as opposed how much is excessive, disruptive, and disturbing? This inevitably ties literary interpretation to ethics.
Ian Baucom writes, “Certain to be an important and influential book, The Deliverance of Othersexamines the profound challenges that the ‘contemporary’ historical moment poses to literary novel writing in the early twenty-first century, when the fine line between a ‘sufficient’ and an ‘excessive’ measure of otherness seems to have been trespassed, when, as Palumbo-Liu puts it in his extraordinary reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, readers of the novel are asked to imagine themselves confronting ‘tidal wave of difference’ that exceeds the specific capacities of realist form and the more general compact that literary writing offers to strike between historical conditions and the liberal, sympathetic imagination.”
Read the introduction
