ABSTRACT
Exposure becomes an epidermis phenomenon, a skin occurrence, the clinical mark of a daily drama played out in the open. The resulting community is, at best, a society of shared exposure. Thus, necessity and contingency meet in an ontological scenario made of ever-separating singularities, a Weltbild or world-picture with roots in classical existentialism. The term exposure and its derivates literally pervade modernist fiction. Fears of exposure to the ills of societal cohabitation – the ills of reality unmasked as society or even ideology – can be felt in nearly all prose fictions of the post-Richardson era, regardless of whether they are influenced by Rousseau or not. Mutual engagement determines exposure, and this exposure or exposition is notionally bound up with other concepts like exteriority, extroversion, extension and, more importantly, existence. Existence is thus staked on the minimal superfluity of a "more" – the thing itself, die Sache selbst – that is extra-posited.
