The Question of presence in two novels by Dorothy Canfield Fisher: a reading based on Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry
ENIn this paper, my aim is to discuss two novels by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in conjunction with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. What do these two novels, written by an American woman writer in the first half of the twentieth century, have to do with these two French phenomenologists? The anwer to this is very simple. They ask the same questions. Naturally, the questions that we find asked in a novel are asked differently from the way a philosopher would ask them. Literature does not pose problems and then analyze them in a strategic way. Instead, literature lives problems and we find the analysis, or the outcome, precisely in the very way in which these problems are lived. But sometimes we need philosophy to understand the very depth of the problems that are lived, the questions that are asked.
