Identity and alterity in a selection of James Purdy’s short stories

Other Americas collects essays written by historians, media and cultural studies experts and scholars of American literature on the notions of identity and otherness. To this end, it addresses both the forms of mediatic representation of small town America and a radically different way of writing and disseminating poetry and fiction. In identifying liminality as the center of whatever antagonizes the values of liberty, democracy and the pursuit of happiness, the section entitled “The Dark Side” deals with the emergence of an increasingly polarized and conflictual image of the US. By establishing a connection between the near past and the forthcoming future of electronic literature, from the first experiments in computer poetry and ergodic narrative to the online practices of the cybertext, the section entitled “The Dark Site” investigates a number of creative ways by which human identity is confronted with the machinic alterity of the electronic calculator and is more and more challenged by the advent of AI. Other Americas questions how and why the irreducible otherness of the alter alter looks in the mirror – and it is looked back by – the twin sameness of the alter idem .