SubStance

There is ethics—that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology—in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack.

— (Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies 214)

The late twentieth century witnessed unprecedented attention to ethics in literary studies. The notion of an “Ethical Turn” was in fact coined to attest to this burgeoning academic interest. Unfortunately this kind of designation, while useful in pointing to a perceived shift in the concerns of interpretive communities, risks homogenizing the unruly voices responsible for such a turn.¹ A genealogy of the turn quickly reveals its contested origin, its fraught beginnings. Is/was the “Ethical Turn” a mere moment in the cyclical history of interpretive turns, situated between the “Linguistic Turn” and the nascent “Aesthetic Turn,” with the “Cultural Turn” eagerly waiting in the hermeneutic queue?² While debates over the function of literary criticism surely date back to the very inception of literature, Frank Kermode detects in today’s generation of critics an unparalleled hostility to both the ethical value of criticism (which, in the past, “was extremely important; it could be taught; it was an influence for civilization and even for personal amendment” [“Literary Criticism” 194]) and the aesthetic value of literature in its own right:

Under the old dispensation, one might choose between several methodologies which had in common only the assumptions that it was permissible to speak of literary quality and that one could read with a degree of attention that warranted the issuing of judgments, even of declarations, that some works demanded to be read by all who claimed the right to expound and instruct. Under the newer metacritical dispensation, there were now many interesting ways of banning such activities and substituting for them methods of description and analysis which might derive their force from linguistics, politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, or what were claimed to be brand-new, unillusioned, and exciting ways of writing history.

(Pleasure and Change, 16)

It might be tempting to see the “turn to ethics” as a kind of exorcism of the post-68 mentality that gave us the slogan of “the death of the author” and the rise of symptomatic readings³: the turn to ethics would be, in this [End Page 3] respect, tantamount to a return to the so-called older dispensation. Resisting such a nostalgic and potentially reactionary move, Wayne C. Booth, in his 1988 The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, adopts a broader and less exclusionary definition of ethics, not only taking stock of a new ethical sensibility sweeping literary studies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, reading it back into its most trenchant opponents:

I’m thinking here not only of the various new overtly ethical and political challenges to “formalism”: by feminist critics asking embarrassing questions about a male-dominated literary canon and what it has done to the “consciousness” of both men and women; by black critics pursuing Paul Moses’s kind of question about racism in American classics; by neo-Marxists exploring class biases in European literary traditions; by religious critics attacking modern literature for its “nihilism” or “atheism.” I am thinking more of the way in which even those critics who work hard to purge themselves of all but the most abstract formal interests turn out to have an ethical program in mind—a belief that a given way of reading, or a given kind of genuine literature, is what will do us most good.

(5)

Twenty years later, Janet Wolff, in The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, approvingly quotes and reiterates Booth’s totalizing assessment and harmonizing gesture in the last pages of her book. Defining an ethics of reading as a commitment to a “kind of genuine literature” that “will do us most good,” however, seems to me at once disarming and alarming: disarming for its obviousness (who, among ethical critics, doubts that a literary ethical sensibility is beneficial?) and alarming for its vagueness (what is meant by beneficial or good?).

While this volume does not flatly reject Booth and Wolff’s invitation...