Abstract

On the Culture of the Stranger is a theoretical essay that sketches some of the conflicting perspectives of modern culture, from its origins in the European baroque to its destination in post-colonial societies . The argument is divided into two parts, each recounting the story of European culture in 'the new world' from a different angle and methodological perspective. The overall argument examines the themes of conversion and migration that can be found to underscore both modern European and post-colonial concepts of culture. Chapter one examines the origins of the modern aesthetic notion of the sublime in the period of the baroque and traces the concept of Nature underlying the sublime experience to the images of nature that followed 'the discovery of the new world.' Chapter two traces some of the millennialist and eschatological significations the concept of nature receives in the cultural narratives of European modernism and postmodernism. This chapter contains a reading of Michel Tournier's Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique, a postmodern version of the Robinson Crusoe fable, as well as a discussion of the cultural theories of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Part two undertakes a preliminary study of the origins of the modern literary "stranger" in the cultural narratives of European modernism and postmodernism, and argues that the critical reception that European modernism is now undergoing in the United States is the result of the once idealized figure of the modernist stranger being determined by the ideological relationships that belong to colonial and post-colonial history. Chapter three speculates on the fate of a modernist aesthetic categories and notions of "literary space" as a result of this post-colonial reception, and discusses the combination of psychoanalytic and ethnological representations in the current evaluation of literary and cultural narratives. Chapter four contains a reading of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's short story "That Smallest Woman in the World," the analysis of which reveals the logic of the "colonizing ratio" in post-colonial cultural and literary experience