Current Issue

Subscription Information

Submission Information

Archives

Editorial Staff

Advisory Board

Back Issue Order Form

English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Marshall W. Gregory
Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters / 194 

Daniel R. Schwarz
The Ethics of Reading Elie Wiesels Night / 221 

Adam Zachary Newton
Nothing But Face To Hell with Philosophy?: Withold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the Scandal of Human Countenance / 243

Kathleen Lundeen
Who Has the Right to Feel?: The Ethics of Literary Empathy / 261

Charles Altieri
Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience / 272 

Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack
Saints, Sinners, and the Dickensian Novel: The Ethics of Storytelling in John Irvings The Cider House Rules / 298 

James Phelan
Sethes Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading / 318

G. Thomas Couser
Making, Taking, and Faking Lives: The Ethics of Collaborative Life Writing / 334 

Wayne C. Booth
Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple / 351 

Marshall W. Gregory, Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters / 194 
Most of us cannot evade the deep intuition that identifying with characters in stories can exert a powerful influence on the quality and content of our own lives. To analyze how fictions exert this influence and to assess its effects is ethical criticisms job. What literary criticism needs in particular is a theoretical basis for inquiries into and judgments about the potential ethical effects of literature and narrative art in general. We need theoretical grounding because practical ethical criticism goes on all the time, often conducted in a most helter-skelter, contradictory, and intellectually incoherent way. Some contemporary critics may want to insist that ethical criticism is irrelevant, but ethical criticisms century-long rejection in the academy is matched in scope only by the ceaseless talk about ethical issues that goes on inside and outside of the academy. The persistence of these issues as foci of constant and passionate controversy gives the lie to ethical criticisms irrelevance. We may not always know how to live with it but we certainly cannot live without it. Ethical criticism cannot be evaded by epistemological relativism, by emotivism, or by the view of art as mere entertainment, for none of these views engages the overwhelming evidence both in literature and in life that imitations of fictional models comprise an important source of conduct for most of us much of the time. The aims of ethical criticism are to lead readers to a better and clearer understanding of certain issues: that literary effects are always potential, never determined; that moral and ethical criteria are unavoidable in both understanding and evaluating narratives; and that almost all critical approaches rest to some extent on ethical presuppositions that may be silent but that are always present. The content of ethical criticism rests on certain notions about self (ethos) and self- or ethical-development: that human beings are always negotiating between better and worst versions of their own ethos; that moral character is always in motion, not fixed; that the vicarious imagination is the important mechanism that makes the actual transfer of ethical perspectives from literary works and into the heads of readers; and that the nutritional analogy (we become what we consume) offers one way to explain both the kind of contribution that ethical criticism makes and its manner of making it. 
back to top
 

Daniel R. Schwarz, The Ethics of Reading Elie Wiesels Night / 221 
Readers need to differentiate between an ethic of reading and an ethics while reading. I propose five stages of the hermeneutical activities in ethical reading and interpretation: (1) immersion in the process of reading and the discovery of imagined worlds (2) quest for understanding (3) self-conscious reflection (4) critical analysis (5) cognition in terms of what we know. I then turn to Wiesels Night as an example. When we read Night, we are aware of the speakers role as ethical witness and the moral role played by Wiesels taut, spare, parabolic style. We become conscious of the recurring patterns: everlasting night as moral death, the disruption of father-son ties, hunger, and fire as an image of the crematorium and ultimately the Holocaust itself. Reflecting self-consciously on the text and learning about its publication history, we become aware of the ethical implications of Frans Mauriacs Christian introduction and his misreading. Wiesels own editing of the original Yiddish version also raises ethical issues about representing Holocaust memory and trauma. Finally, I turn to the ethical implications of a parallel example of reading Holocaust narrative: Bettelheims indictment of Anne Franks diary. 
back to top
 

Adam Zachary Newton, Nothing But FaceTo Hell with Philosophy?: Withold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and the Scandal of Human Countenance / 243 
How can one escape from what one is, where is the leverage to come from? Witold Gombrowicz writes. Our shape penetrates and confines us, as much as from within as from without.  The problem that Form thus introduces is also the problem of Face, and facefamiliar to philosophers and theorists like Sartre, Levinas, Lacan, and Bakhtin as the phenomenological site par excellence for human encounter, transference, and answerabilityboth embodies and bespeaks a permanent scandal, a field of combat, the modernist metonymic trump card to Culture and Autonomy alike.  Bruno Schulz discovers a deep pathos in human faces too, but unlike his fellow Pole, he links it to the pathos of metaphor and figuration generally: a fundamental principle of transmigrated form. Using the trope of the facean admittedly minor feature within a minor modernismthis paper suggests how we might use it to read the simultaneously larger-in-scale, and thus link nation with narration: Europe at mid-century, nationalism as an always unstable fixture of identity, Otherness and the minor as vicissitudes and exigencies within Europe (or between Europes), too. 
back to top
 

Kathleen Lundeen, Who Has the Right to Feel?: The Ethics of Literary Empathy / 261 
While a show of empathy may enhance ones profile in life, it has of late raised suspicion when directed toward fictional subjects. Writers or readers who appear to empathize with anothers life experiences are often accused of arrogating a cultural authority to which they have no natural claim. The question persists: to what extent is our literary engagement biologically or culturally determined? An examination of Felicia Hemanss Indian Womans Death-Song reveals the problematic nature of literary empathy and its ethical consequences. 
back to top
 

Charles Altieri, Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience / 272 
Any adequate account of the ethical force potential in literary experience needs to focus on states most clearly present in lyric experience. Traditionally, models of ethical criticism derive from the reading of novels and stress the same principles of judgment that apply when we make assessments of actions in ordinary situations. This situation is fine for clarifying how moral thinking traditionally works, and even for supplementing its capacity to make discriminations or use the force that pathos brings as an index of public concerns. But such an approach cannot do much to show why the aesthetic dimension of literary experience matters for ethics, and hence it cannot fully address the ways that such experience can modify our understanding of ethos and our commitments to specific models of the qualities and levels of intensity that might also function as aspects of our judgements about actions. So by concentrating on the limitations of representative thinkers like Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, it may be possible to adapt a modified Nietzschean account of ethical value shaped by how literary experience stages value for subjects. 
back to top
 

Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Saints, Sinners, and the Dickensian Novel: The Ethics of Storytelling in John Irvings The Cider House Rules / 298 
In The Cider House Rules, John Irving self-consciously adopts the literary form of the Dickensian novelwith its multiplicity of characters, its narrative mass, its overt sense of sentimentality, and its generic intersections with such modes as the detective storyas the forum for constructing the fictions that intentionally challenge his readers value systems. Noting Irvings insistence that the novel as literary form should address something of human value, ethical criticism highlights how Irvings own ethics of storytelling transform and determine many of his narrative practices, especially his use of the particular. By chronicling several major and minor characters histories in his novel with an uncanny precision and attentiveness, Irving creates the ethical construct of characterscape, offering inroads into the very human problem of abortion while resisting any legalistic conclusion or correct political vision. 
back to top
 

James Phelan, Sethes Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading / 318 
Toni Morrison presents three different tellings of the central event of Beloved, Sethes instinctive decision to kill her children rather than have them become slaves, but the triangulation of those tellings does not lead to any clear signal from Morrison about how her audience should judge that event. This unusual treatment transfers considerable ethical responsibility to the audience even as it deepens Morrisons case about the horrors of slavery. Morrisons narrative strategies, then, are designed to increase the affective and political power of the novel; they also establish a special, albeit uncommon, ethical relation between implied author and authorial audience. 
back to top
 

G. Thomas Couser, Making, Taking, and Faking Lives: The Ethics of Collaborative Life Writing / 334 
Ethical dilemmas seem to be built into collaborative life writing in ways that are peculiar to it, and critics and writers need to reckon more forthrightly with the economic, political, and ethical dimensions of collaborative life writing. The ethical difficulties of collaborative autobiography are rooted in its nearly oxymoronic status. The partners contributions are not only different but incommensurate entitieson the one hand, lived experience mediated by memory; on the other, the labor of eliciting, recording, inscribing, and organizing this material. We might schematize collaborative autobiography by imagining examples as lying along a continuum from ethnographic autobiography, in which the writer outranks the subject, to celebrity autobiography, in which the subject outranks the writer. The inherent imbalance between the partners contributions may be complicated by a political imbalance between them; often, collaborations involve partners whose relation is hierarchized by some differencein race, culture, gender, class, age, or (in the case of narratives of illness or disability) somatic condition. The ethical dilemmas differ according to where on this continuum a particular collaboration lies. Ethical violationsinequitiesoccur mainly in two distinct but interrelated aspects of the projectthe portrayal and the partnership. 
back to top
 

Wayne C. Booth, Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple / 351 
This essay is one of many recent efforts to challenge two critical schools popular through much of this century: those who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine literary or aesthetic quality, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. After tracing some reasons for the neglect of ethical criticism, I argue that to answer the schools adequately requires us to acknowledge the full diversity of what stories do to and for us; no one critical method can do justice to more than a fraction of them. Extending Sheldon Sackss distinction among three kinds of fiction (action, satire, and apologue), I claim that if ethical criticism is to thrive, critics must recognize that different modes of narrative invite or respond to radically different ethical approaches.
back to top