Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).

“The Scientist of the Holy Ghost”: Sunspring and Reading Nonsense

“…Following Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and various others, Dorothy Hale argues that the "foundational aesthetic" of "the new ethical theory" of literature "lies in the felt encounter with alterity that it brings to the reader." 40 Referring primarily to the works of Henry James, Hale and Butler both argue that it is in those moments in his novels when readers are most stymied into incomprehension that they are also most open to the possibility of ethical connection to others. Incomprehensible moments in novels exasperate readers and, in doing so, put them in a "position to understand the limits of judgement and to cease judging, paradoxically, in the name of ethics."…”

Triangulating an Ethos: Ethical Criticism, Novel Alterity, and Mori Ōgai's “Stereoscopic Vision”

“…As Dorothy Hale argues in "Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century," both approaches require a kind of oscillation between immersive and reflective modes of reading. 9 Martha Nussbaum's theory of identification depends upon both sympathetic care for characters and conscious reflection on the responses and judgments that novelistic representation elicits. Similarly, Butler posits readers' sympathetic immersion in the fictional world of characters in order to theorize the ethical value of a confrontation with radical alterity that forces readers to acknowledge the limits of their understanding.…”

The Remains of Friendship and the Ethics of Misreading: Melville, Emerson, Thoreau

“…Instead, the story seems to call for what Dorothy Hale has recently called an ethics and aesthetics of alterity. 9 Seeking to reconcile "post-structuralist" and "humanist" invocations of a specifically fictional ethical demand, Hale identifies a widespread investment in fiction's capacity to give us a "felt recognition of the limits of our ways of knowing." Specifically, Hale argues, it is the encounter with an enigmatic and resistant character-with precisely one who refuses to be, in Judith Butler's terms, socially bound-that rivets the reader; if there is a uniquely ethical dimension to the literary experience, Hale continues, it should be located in a revised understanding of what Martha Nussbaum calls a relationship of "care."…”