Assigned readings often solicit the same complaint from students: “It's boring. I can't relate.” Why, the frustrated teacher might be tempted to ask, should a novel or poem cater to you? Is the demand for relatability not a form of narcissism? Of course, the teacher must resist condescension and take the concerns of the student seriously. A teaching moment presents itself: reading, we might profess, is about the experience of otherness. Reading should force the reader to inhabit a specific place, a specific person, and a specific circumstance. Reading should take us beyond ourselves.

There is a long tradition of arguments dating back to the Romantics that corroborate. In the high theoretical register, one can point to the work of Maurice Blanchot, as well as his more widely discussed heirs, who coined the idea of the “space of literature” to describe the sense of alterity that we encounter in the act of reading. Many of our modern masters dramatize the experience. It often occurs when a character confronts a uniquely different individual, encounters a ghost, undergoes a moment of recognition or epiphany, or recalls a powerful memory. Think William Wordsworth, Henry James, or Virginia Woolf.

The experience of otherness causes the stable contours of identity to fissure. Witnessing the ghost or the visitation of a lost memory enables a character to observe an alternative self: who they were, may have been, or could be. They recognize, in other words, the contingencies of life that call attention to the fallibility of their self-assured identity. We call such moments the sublime and value their ability to transform us. They can redress trauma, heal wounds, or simply enable us to learn and grow. We also fear the experience of otherness. It can reopen wounds or spark uncomfortable change. These are experiences of pleasure and pain at once that sometimes go by the name jouissance.

The theoretical stakes of alterity buttress a pedagogical necessity. Reading for otherness does not merely allow us access to a higher self or reveal the emptiness of the self. More broadly, the experience of otherness helps us discover the range of human potentiality.