Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary St ...

art. That this apparently aesthetic decision by modernist writers is itself also an ethical decision, Frattarola’s analysis makes clear. The idiosyncrasies of modernist allusive writing are responsive to a perceived duty. The irresponsible modernists, disdaining intelligibility, may at least be responsible to their calling as twentieth-century poets and novelists.

Indeed one of the main claims that a collection such as this supports is that aesthetic and ethical or political approaches to literary study need not be mutually exclusive. The truth of such an unremarkable yet still contested claim becomes necessarily evident when literary study involves the analysis of irresponsibility as a theme, as it does in a number of essays collected here, such as Julia Kuehn’s exploration of interracial desire in Anglo-Indian women’s romance literature of the late-Victorian period, or Cordula Lemke’s “Irresponsible Women, Irresponsible Men: Joseph Conrad’s Short Stories”. But it is also evident in Shirley Chew’s penetrating study of Naipaul’s attempt to discover an aesthetic form for his writing that would be answerable to the complexities of a content rooted in Naipaul’s irreducibly ethical interest in history and geopolitics. Keith Hopper, for his part, argues explicitly that the irreverent satire of Irish censorship practices embedded in Flann O’Brien’s novels, and in particular his reworking of the Orpheus myth, should “be placed in two interrelated contexts: in an aesthetic domain (a challenge to the conceits of high modernism); and an ethical domain (a resistance to the nativist hegemony of post-colonial, Catholic Ireland)”. Hopper’s reading reveals of course another aspect of the problem by drawing attention to the intermediary figures who interfere with what Frattarola calls the mutual responsibility between author and reader. Flann O’Brien is far from unique in creating irresponsible narrators of course, and those interested in this question of responsibility will be drawn also to Ed Cohen’s reflections on Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable creation Watson in the essay “Narrative Responsibility and the Sherlock Holmes Stories”, and to Derek Hand’s intriguing comments on the “editor” of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. Here, too, a taste for both aesthetics and ethics is evident. It seems indeed reasonable in such cases to query the responsibilities of an author who creates narrators or editors to advance claims to historical