Considering Ethics in the Short Prose of Anne Duden
In: Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words
Author:
Stephanie Bird
Stephanie Bird
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Anne Duden’s short stories depict pain and intense suffering, yet most are not explicitly concerned with the historical and social basis through which the suffering of the individual woman might be understood. This paper analyses the ‘status’ of the suffering; whether it is linked to a particular moral concern, or whether it raises more general questions about how we understand ourselves as ethical subjects. I draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas to argue that the stories stage the intolerability of the ethical burden on the individual, but that by their uncompromising depiction of anguish they succeed in putting the reader into question.