ALTERITATEA ÎN CADRUL IDENTITĂȚII
ALTERITY IN IDENTITY

Summary/Abstract: We are positioning ourselves at the present moment of the signifying practice of writing and of the readership’s types of response.At a first glance, this present moment is divided between readers who stutter to believe that reading is the salvation and the answer to all our problems, and readers who see literature as a fashion. Probing deeper into literary affairs, we see that high-minded literature is almost vanishing under heaps of waste products launched into the market by the art and literature of consumption, which haunt the reader disguising themselves as the latest fashion and modern tendencies. The latter type of literature mentioned is a cheap show, superficial, made for the only purpose of being sold. It usurps the status of genuine literature, revealing a total lack of aesthetic awareness. It attracts the reader through violence, eroticized bodies, exoticism and sex, creating in the mind of the reader all sorts of fake images and realities. This present moment is the time when the differences between copies and originals are abolished and the readers consume illusions of reality and happiness, so we are witnessing to an act of “alterity” in identity. These readers’ needs are manipulated in terms of profit of selling by the publishing houses and the writers who manufacture these types of books, whose unique epochal discovery is that money can be made through writing that create certain reading appetites and tastes in their targeted victim, the reader, who, from an acculturated individual turns into an obedient consumer of textual litter.This society influences the readers’ consumption habits, the writers’ standards and the writing process itself. Nowadays, in order to be read, a book should seduce its readers rather than instruct them or move them to high pursuits. By seducing readers, a book gains power. It is the power to shape its reader according to its main character, in the way of thinking, dressing, behaving in the real world or socializing. The fictional plot of the book becomes thus real, creating hyperreality, in which the reader identifies strongly with the characters of the book. Coined by Jean Baudrillard, the word “hyperreality” designates a copy of a copy, that is removed from its original, which can stand on its own and even replace the original. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal, substituting the signs of the real for the real (Baudrillard, 1983). Baudrillard (1983) described the period as an “age of simulations” (p. 4). DOI: 10.29302/InImag.2017.8.10

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