Facing the Monster: The Ethical Challenge of Weird Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the prioritization of empathy as the foundation of ethical reading, especially through identification, obscures the alterity of the other and forecloses truly ethical engagement. Through close readings of texts that center the literary monster as a site of estrangement, I propose that Weird fiction, defined not as a genre but as a mode, disrupts empathic strategies and creates affordances for ethical reading rooted in attentiveness, humility, and refusal of mastery. Chapter One establishes a theoretical framework grounded in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face and James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances to critique aesthetic mechanisms of empathy. Chapter Two examines the fiction of Mariana Enriquez, whose grotesque figures resist empathic access but demand ethical attention despite discomfort. Chapter Three turns to Antoine Volodine’s post-exoticism, in which formal and meta-fictional hostility disorients the reader and renders them complicit as a spectator of violence as well as intruder. Chapter Four explores Old French texts by Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes where shapeshifters, werewolves, and other monsters prefigure Weird encounters that unsettle chivalric epistemologies and challenge the legibility of the human. The conclusion reflects on the pedagogical and political implications of ethical estrangement, proposing a critical posture for reading and teaching literature that centers the irreducible other. Across these chapters, I argue that the Weird monster functions as an interruption; it is an aesthetic, ethical, and affective provocation that challenges reading for identification. I advocate for an ethics that, rather than beginning with empathy and falling victim to its limitations, allows one to turn their attention towards the face of the monster.