Peter Melville. Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. ISBN: 0889205175. Price: Can$65

Peter Melville’s project is indebted to “the Derridian commentary” on hospitality that is part of the turn in Jacques Derrida’s later work toward ethics. As such, there is a certain familiarity in the theoretical moves Derrida (and Melville) make concerning hospitality—just as we can only forgive the unforgivable, so too is hospitality only possible on the condition of its impossibility. In other words, despite our most hospitable efforts, the stranger will always in some way remain strange and resist our attempts at accommodation. Nevertheless, reading this resistance is itself productive as Melville demonstrates in his analysis of a variety of Romantic texts that seem haunted by the very strangers they fail to accommodate. Melville argues that the hospitable encounter grounds Romantic subjectivity because it engenders a recognition of an unavoidable alterity within subjectivity, which compels the subject to assert self-sovereignty by responding to and thus becoming responsible for the exceptional strangeness of the other. These are provocative issues, and call to mind the debates surrounding Carl Schmitt’s arguments about sovereignty and the state of exception as well as Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on homo sacer, but unfortunately these connections aren’t mentioned in the book. In fact, although other thinkers and critics are occasionally referred to, particularly Kristeva, Lyotard, and Levinas, it is Derrida whose presence in the book is almost perpetual. Rarely do more than a few pages go by before his authority is invoked. Despite this fixation on Derrida, the book’s application of the logic of hospitality to Romantic texts is fruitful. A basic model of Romantic hospitality is as follows: when a stranger is welcomed into a Romantic text he or she functions as a split reference, referring both to an “outside" that disrupts the text’s claims to closure and totality and to an internal self-dividedness with the text’s host. As such, this startling stranger always refers to more than can be accommodated by the text in which he or she is housed and the stranger thus becomes a figure within the text that compels readers (and writers) to respond to and thus become responsible for an excess the text cannot contain. The logic and implications of Romantic hospitality become clearer in the book's four main chapters, which focus upon a series of narratives in Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley that contain scenes of “reading the foreign” (7) or hospitable encounter. The first two chapters on Rousseau and Kant, who are included as philosophical precursors to Romanticism, demonstrate the difficulty in thinking through the reception of alterity. The chapter on Rousseau explores his fascination with the “protocols and manners of hospitality” (24) in his late writings, beginning with a reading of his prose poem Le Levite d'Ephraim and continuing with Emile; or, On Education (1762) and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). The reading of Emile is particularly engaging and focuses upon the moment during Emile’s search for his beloved Sophie when he suddenly realizes that the woman he has been seeking is in fact already sitting before him as part of a family that has extended their hospitality to him on his journey. As Melville points out, Emile's encounter with Sophie is similar to Wordsworth’s missed encounter during the crossing of Simplon Pass. In this startling moment of recognition, Emile sees two faces—the face he projected and the face he failed to see. And this second face, Sophie’s real face, "is unfathomable, and yet it demands to be read. It compels him to 'search' its contours—every crinkle, every twitch that configures the face anew" (39). Kant is similarly troubled by the foreign and the …