ARTICLE
TITLE

Failure of Communication in Face-to-Face Encounter in The Zoo Story: A Levinasian Reading

SUMMARY

Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1961) is a perfect example of Levinasian face-to-face encounter in American society. In this one-act play, Albee depicts failure of communication in American life. This article intends to examine the failure of communication in face-to-face encounter in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story from Levinasian ethical perspective. The present article attempts to investigate the failed communication in this play through Levinas’s ethical notions of “face”, “responsibility” and “love”. It also discusses Levinas’s view about language and his distinction of ethical language which he calls “Saying” and ontological language which he terms “Said”. 

KEYWORDS

PAGES
pp. 30 - 35

 Articles related

Jingwei TANG    

Fuzziness is one of the objective characteristics of human language, which makes language flexible and reliable. It’s helpful to keep communication more euphemistic and convincing. Hedges are core of fuzzy language and the study on hedges contributes to ... see more


Musli Ariani,A. Effendi Kadarisman    

Abstract: Previous research findings have led to a gap that sociopragmatic failure, instead of pragmalinguistic failure, has scarcely been resolved despite its crucial function in communication. Therefore, this paper proposes a story-based approach, part... see more


Lamhot Naibaho    

Abstract: This study aims to determine the factors affecting students' failures due to anxiety in learning English. It was conducted at Universitas Kristen Indonesia, Jakarta, within three months. This study was a descriptive qualitative study with a sur... see more


Liu Dan Dan, I Made Suastra, Elvira Septevany    

The aim of this study is to help Indonesian learners avoid the failure of social pragmatics in intercultural communication and achieve successful communication goals. The data collection technique was carried out in two ways, the one way was done by dist... see more


Yuli Widiana,Sumarlam Sumarlam,Sri Marmanto,Dwi Purnanto,Mohamed Zain Sulaiman    

Phatic communication is a discourse mechanism used primarily to establish and maintain social bonds. It operates differently across societies as well as genders within the same society. Thus, failure to understand such differences might result in misunde... see more