Conclusion

Abstract

The poetics or language of otherness has been a key to this book. It has also, in prose and poetry, stressed war, trauma, and literature: the wound explored here is the violence through misunderstanding, greed, and ideology-that is, stories of power, control, and dominance or a defense against them. The study ranges from ancient texts to recent ones. It began by concentrating on the trauma of harming and killing the other in an obliteration we have come to call genocide. Moreover, the frame of this book is, in chapter 2, the destruction or almost destruction of the Native Americans by the Spaniards and those who worked for them after Columbus, and in chapter 10, the conscious and systematic attempt to destroy European Jews by the Germans. Violence can be willful, ignorant, or ideologically blind. For the most part, the study has focused on language, examining the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader. How words in fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and prose represent otherness, violence, and trauma has been my central concern.