"In this book the ethics of Levinas, founded on unconditional respect for alterity, are set against more violent depictions of encounters with the Other in key twentieth-century texts by Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Yourcenar, Duras and Genet.". "This struggle is also enacted through the experience of reading, as the reader is established as the text's Other: a potentially endangering gaze to be assimilated or annihilated. Whereas some ethical critics posed a relationship of 'friendship' between the texts and readers, the novels examined here dramatize a set of responses ranging from suspicion to fear or hostility, violence and hatred. Colin Davis argues that altericide, the murder of the Other, should be regarded as one of the fundamental impulses behind modern fiction, appearing as one of its priveleged themes and informing its relationship to its reader."--BOOK JACKET.