Author Profile

Dr. Uttam Boruah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Sibsagar University, Sivasagar, Assam. Dr. Chandan Kumar Panda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Rajiv Gandhi University (A Central University), Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh.

About The Book

The book Alterity in the Poetry of Dilip Naik: A Study in the Theoretical Perspectives of Buber and Levinas discusses 'alterity' in Dilip Naik's poetry. His poetry collections include You I Could Hold, By Inference and A Gift of Smoke. The 'other' is the central theme and motif of his poetic compositions. The other appears variously as the projections of his self, or an embodied other who is a pure possibility and remains constantly elusive, or providence to whom his poetry is a prayer whose directedness is its destiny. The impacts of Bhakti tradition and its poetics, aesthetics and metaphysics are perceptible in his poetic articulation of the other. There is also something beyond the Bhakti framework applied to him. It is the complexity of articulating the other in a verbal space given the limits of language, and the impacts of modernity and the loss of longing and imagination. Given the complexity of conceptual and imaginative articulations of the other, Martin Buber's I and Thou and Between Man and Man, and Emmanuel Levinas' Otherwise than being and Entre Nous are also studied to make sense of the theoretical and philosophical perceptions of the other in the Western epistemological interventions. While discussing the configuration of the other, Buber's humanism is illustrated through the emphasis on the production of dialogic space and the ethos of meeting to generate a space or the forces of relation to flourish, Levinas in his philosophical idiom discusses the philosophy of face and the ethics that face evokes.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgment
Abbreviations
Chapter I Introduction
Chapter II Dialogical Alterity in Martin Buber's I and Thou and Between Man and Man
Chapter III Alterity in Emmanuel Levinas' Entre Nous and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
Chapter IV 'Other' in Dilip Naik's Poetry
Chapter V Conclusion
Bibliography