This book explores the multifaceted concepts of otherness barbarism and exteriority. Is
encountering the 'Other' still possible in a world in which we all have become rootless
disconnected and strangers alienated from the outside world and from ourselves? Does the
question of 'Otherness' still bear a meaning after the deconstruction of the self and the
crumbling of the very concept of identity? The author examines some major twentieth-century
poetic responses to the violent denial of otherness and difference in modern Europe. The myth
of Medea is brought in to reflect upon the tragic history of the encounter with the Other in
European thought epitomising the way rationalist Positivism suppressed the Other through
either assimilation or exclusion. The volume goes on to explore the concept of barbarism in
language revealing how some modern or post-modern European poets confronted their respective
languages with the barbaric - otherness the outside the 'uncivilised'. The author focuses on
three twentieth-century poets who experienced barbarism in some way and whose work constitutes
a poetic counter-attack and an attempt at regeneration: Henri Michaux Paul Celan and Ted
Hughes. These poets wrote within post-modernity in a state of endless displacement and their
anguished alienation echoes the plight of Medea - the barbarian amongst the 'civilised' Greeks.
Their new lingua barbara became a language of otherness of inter-space and displacement.
