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

temporary end in many corners the exuberant extolling of laissez-faire capitalism (moral hazard be damned!). But the crisis of confidence in the market proceeded in tandem with a superbly confident credulity in the ability of average observers to identify a horde of responsible parties: “subprime” borrowers and housing-market speculators, unscrupulous loan originators and risk-oblivious mortgage banks, overextended monolines and cavalier rating agencies, the investment banks with their collateralised debt obligations, the hedge funds with their leveraged investments, the lack of regulation, the excess of regulation, the artificially cheap credit, the mere talk of recession, and even—as you can imagine, I don’t need to make this up—the enthusiastic supporters of Barack Obama who made the (free) market stumble about in fearful anticipation of a Democratic Whitehouse. The deluge in New Orleans a few years earlier resulted in a similar bout of guilt-mongering. The point, however, is not to ridicule journalism for its impressive faith in the efficacy and accuracy of its exposés. (Journalism in fact does a good job of ensuring bit players are held to account for the crimes of their masters.) The point is only to note how fertile and ubiquitous is the need to expose the guilty.

The appeal to stable concepts of responsibility, in any case, is hardly limited to the media. Today’s financial journalism indeed reads like a farcical rehearsal of the much more interesting critique of irresponsibility undertaken by Victorian novelists in the heady days of market speculation in nineteenth-century England, of which Tamara Wagner’s contribution to this book provides such a comprehensive and incisive study. Despite all the questions posed by science and philosophy, and historically also by literature, then, tales of crime and punishment, guilt and confession, responsibility and irresponsibility, continue everywhere to flourish, and ethics and ethical criticism continue to thrive. Indeed, the past two decades have witnessed a veritable renaissance in ethical theory, the consequences of which can be seen now beyond the bounds of philosophy in literary and cultural studies. Hence, the so-called “ethical turn” in criticism, indebted to a renewed interest in the legacy of Levinas, to the more proximate engagement in Jacques Derrida’s late