Drawing from the fields of rhetoric, cultural studies, literature, and folkloristics, Kathleen Glenister Roberts argues that identity and the history of alterity in the West can be understood more clearly through narrative motifs. She provides analyses of these motifs including infanticide, universalism, the Tower of Babel, the warrior Other, the noble savage, entropology, and the trickster. With current intellectual conflict as its subtext, this book posits that identity is always negotiated toward Otherness. Roberts interrogates narrative constructions of Western biases toward non-Western Others, with each chapter addressing a Western historical moment through an exemplary narrative. This process shows that by imagining and objectifying Others, Western cultures were creating their own Selves. In confronting the ethnocentrism of past historical moments, Roberts invites us to recognize it in the present—in a new way. Alterity and Narrative asks that we afford Others the ability to transcend their own ethnocentrism, and therefore avoid well-meaning but naïve calls for "cultural sensitivity."

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Identity, Alterity, and Narrative

1.Soteria, the Mother as Other:Medea in Ancient Greece (and Beyond)

2. A Man Cannot Be a Prophet in His Own Country: Saint Paul and Universalism

3. The Curses of Medieval Man: Reverberations from the Tower of Babel

4. Fierce Warriors: The Other as Comrade inOthello and World War II

5. The Enlightenment Noble Savage: Diderot’s Tahiti and Other Imaginary Locales

6. Modernity, Industry, and the Fatal Flaw: The Rise of Entropology inA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

7. The Rhetoric of Possibility: Trickster, the Postmodern Hero

Conclusion: Intercultural Hope: Alterity Post-9/11

Notes
References
Index