Defining what one means by the notion of “otherness” is no mean feat. Typing the word into JSTOR results in no fewer than 39,000 citations. Where does one start? There's “Todorov's Otherness” and “Taylor, Foucault, and Otherness.” There's the “Other in the Writings of Heidegger” and “Hegel on Others and Self,” not to mention the notion of “Otherness in the Pratyabhijnā philosophy.” One can be overwhelmed with notions of what constitutes “otherness.” Perhaps the closest definition I can find that reasonably relates to what I am writing is Riva Kastoryano's “Codes of Otherness,” in which she alludes to Simmel: The Other has been at the core of questions raised by the social sciences in general. For Simmel, the Other, “is the Stranger who is beyond being far and near. The Stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and sundry ‘inner enemy’—an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it.” Interactions within and without groups follow codes, categories, and boundaries to identify the included, the excluded, the conformist, and the deviants as Outsiders, according to Howard Becker, with regard to their disobedience of juridical and political norms or to social and cultural codes (Social Research 77, no. 1, Migration Politics (spring 2010): 79– 100).

To a great extent, what I've attempted to do in these essays is to approach specific texts (e.g., Sarraute's Tropisms) and/or philosophies (e.g., Lawrence's Ranamin) as reflective of Simmel's notion of the Stranger, “whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it.” The entirety of the literary texts I write about (Cahan, Woolf, Schulz, Lawrence, Ionesco, Duras, Wittig, Maraini) really are written from the perspective of being “outside the group” and “confronting” the group both from a sociological perspective and/or an aesthetic one. Challenging male authority is one example of being outside the group; challenging traditional notions of writing fiction is another aspect of being outside the group; challenging one's own loss of culture or being forced to do so is being outside the group and advocating a fascist form of living within a democracy is yet another aspect of being outside the group. Each of these texts challenges “codes of otherness” and by so doing manifests notions of otherness in a distinctly unique manner.