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

of the philosophical insight that there is no front between responsibility and irresponsibility. Indeed, the absence of this front, the blurring of the border, or the exposing of its permeability, is the very stuff of literature’s encounter with ethics. Gibson’s account of the peculiarly singular and personal ethics adopted in different ways by Lurie and Lucy in Coetzee’s Disgrace gives us a good example of this.

Literary criticism has come a long way, in any case, from The Republic’s contention that literature should be anathema to any ethically, politically, and philosophically grounded educational program, even if public policy debates over the nefarious appeal and effects of modern fictional representations of violence remain common and necessary. Richard Burke’s contribution to the present volume, the wide-ranging study “Slaughter and the Innocents”, provides us with a timely reminder of the relevance of such debates in light of the proliferation of violent fantasy fiction written for children. But the remarkable variety of concerns addressed and approaches adopted in the present volume demonstrates also how far from being a rigorous scientific discipline ethical criticism remains, and must remain, and so how far the discipline has yet to go. In part, this is because even the relatively straightforward attempt to specify a simple, manageable area within the field of ethical criticism, such as “responsibility”, tends rather to open many paths of inquiry. There are very many “questions of responsibility”, and very many indeed just within literary studies, each demanding a much fuller elaboration than could be offered within the narrow confines of a single text such as this.

Perhaps the first question of responsibility will always be that of the author to his reader, whether the reader is a child in need of protection from harmful representations of death (the modern determination of what is harmful, of course, being very different from Plato’s) or the general reader who expects to be treated with the minimal respect offered by the writer who communicates in an idiom not so idiosyncratic as to be impenetrable. Angela Frattarola’s chapter for this collection, “Modernism and the Irresponsible Allusion: Joyce, Eliot, and Pound”, however, shows one way in which this other kind of responsibility can be sacrificed nonetheless for the sake of the writer’s conception of his