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

work with religious, ethical, and political themes, and to a number of crucial interventions in literary studies, beginning with J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading, whose enduring influence is reconfirmed by the several invocations of that work in this book. The essays collected here, to be sure, do not all grow organically from the soil of this “turn”, but they do necessarily become a part of the continuing project of literary studies’ contribution to ethical criticism.

The right and ability of literary studies or literature to make any significant contribution to ethical theory does not of course go without saying. Literature traffics in fiction, in the nonserious, the parasitic, perhaps in lies, and the philosopher will often want little enough to do with it, unless it be for the sake of a colourfully provocative example. The old rivalry between philosophy and literature, as Plato saw it in the text that today’s anthologies of literary theory typically offer as the origin of the discipline, was as much over ethics as over truth. If in The Republic the final measure of poetry’s harm to the ideal state is its distance as mimesis from unmediated truth, the first is its debilitating effect on youth. As everyone knows, much of the history of theoretical defences of poetry has been dominated by contrary appeals to poetry’s universal moral value, and especially its representation of what ought to be in the face of the relentless moral challenges posed by what is and the general failure of human history to afford exemplary models of virtue. Perhaps Hegel is right to imagine an increasing differentiation of the ethical order in literary representations as the product of the modern era, and as a symptom of the dissolution of art and the transition in the history of Geist to philosophy, whose prosaic medium is more appropriate to its own concrete content. But if today even philosophy no longer feels especially comfortable thinking, for example, the universal concept of responsibility (“we would no longer dare speak of [that] universal concept”, says Derrida [61]), then perhaps in the final analysis it is the immensely rich and varied, and immensely problematic, ethical terrain mapped out in literary fiction that indeed provides the most honest and insightful representation of the attempt to understand the human being as ethical animal, and perhaps is also the original locus