Interpersonal relations.

Each of the four essays in this issue examines the depiction of interpersonal relations: as possibility, threat, absence, and erasure of boundaries. John Bruns's ethically engaged and engaging essay on James's "The Beast in the Jungle" invokes Bakhtin as a champion of "the open structure of dialogue," an opening specifically to "the surplus of the other," an other who "should surprise us, not reaffirm who we are." However, Maya Wakana, writing on The Wings of the Dove also sees self as formed via interpersonal relations, building on Erving Goffman's brilliantly paranoiac social psychology to show how such interaction continually negotiates psychic and social survival in a collision (sometimes collusion) of "felt stigmatizations." The social moment ends by controlling and limiting rather than allowing for possibility and, in sum, seems rather Hobbesian, a zero sum game for everyone playing it. In contrast to both of these ...