LOTR vs. Scholars, or Academics Can Kiss My As-taldo.

[Bêthberry]

Ah, Lush, love is blind, but the neighbours ain't. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

My apologies for such a tardy response about 'the Other.'

"The Other" or "Otherness" represents a way of thinking about how identities are constructed. It refers to a frame of mind which creates doubleness and which emphasises difference rather than similarity.

Such a frame of mind defines the self in contrast or juxtaposition to this "Other", creating boundaries which help to define the self. Really, a situation of mutually-exclusive oppositions or dichotomies.

What often happens in this context is that the opposition becomes hierarchical. The self projects its own vices, which it cannot acknowledge (think of Freud's repression here), onto the Other, or the not-Self.

One of the most common dichotomies is that between the well-ordered, rational, masculine traits and the chaotic, irrational, feminine traits.

Ideas about Otherness can be found in the writings of the French psychoanalyst, Lacan, the French feminist, Hélène Cixous, and the postcolonial theorist Edward Said, among others.

What does this have to do with Tolkien? I am tempted to read the elves, save for the Vanyar, as those who, with terrible and sombre and horrible consequences, project their failings upon others and look not to themselves as the authors of their own nostalgia.

Bethberry

[ April 06, 2003: Message edited by: Bethberry ]