Abstract
This article purports to demonstrate that romance is characterised by a natural affinity with the expression of an ethics of alterity on account of its reliance on the presentation of paroxystic affect. It engages with a series of texts belonging to the canon of contemporary fiction and uses critical and theoretical material concerning romance as mode and the Levinasian ethics of alterity. By successively analysing romance as the privileged locus of the presentation of the other, as the site where the openness of the present is performed and which allows for the disarticulating power of the event, the article argues in favour of the status of romance as operator of exteriority.