Stephen King's Works In The Light of Emanuel Levinas’ Philosophy Asghar Heidari

Exploring Literary works through philosophical perspectives would assist one to observe the world differently. This study aims to reveal human beings’ divergent outlooks toward happenings throughout their lives within a philosophical context. Since the ancient times, from Plato to Descartes, from Husserl to Heidegger, from Kant to Kierkegaard, several philosophers have explored and criticized subjectivity and ontological aspect of intellectuality, whereas Emanuel Levinas introduces the human being’s metaphysical transcendence and criticizes western philosophy because the ‘Other’ in a relationship with the ‘Self’ is totalized and marginalized. The investigation focuses on various challenges and notions in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982), The Green Mile (1996), and The Dead Zone (1979). King’s specifically delineated characters in these works are questioned under the light of Levinas’ philosophical concepts such as ‘ethics’, ‘responsibility’, hope’, ‘need’, ‘death’, and ‘fate’. Hence, this study attempts to explore how King delineates a well-depicted scenery by which the characters reflect Levinas’s philosophical vision distinctively.

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