Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be

Newton, Adam Zachary

doi:10.1093/alh/13.3.603

American Literary History

2001

DOI: 10.1093/alh/13.3.603

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Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be

Adam Zachary Newton¹

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Cited by 5 publications

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“…6 More recent examples include Hale (2009); Hughes (2010); Wehrs (2013); Attridge (2015); and Wallace (2016). Zachary Newton (2001) argues, to do justice to Levinas means attending to the sum total of his writing, recognizing the way his philosophical and religious work are interanimating. Likewise, to do justice to the sum total of humanity means recognizing with Gayatri Spivak (1992) that for Levinas, the "subject-ship of ethics is certainly male" (76).…”

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Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Wallace

2019

Humanities

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Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy. This essay advocates instead for an approach that sees literary representation and readerly attention as interanimating and that considers teaching an important aspect of an ethics of reading. To support these positions, I turn to Katherena Vermette's 2016 novel The Break, which both represents the urgent injustice of sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls and also metafictionally comments on the ethics of witnessing. Describing how I read with my students the novel's insistent thematization of face-to-face encounters and practices of attention as an invitation to read with Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, I explicate the text's self-aware commentary on both the need for readers to resist self-enlargement in their encounters with others' stories and also the danger of generalizing readerly responsibility or losing sight of the material realities the text represents. I source these challenges both in the novel and in my students' multiple particularities as readers facing the textual other. Ultimately, the essay argues for a more careful attention to which works we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics, and which theoretical frames we bring into classroom conversations.

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Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Wallace

2019

Humanities

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Towards an Ethics of Knowledge

Chen

2005

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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“There is no Gomorrah”: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory

Huffer¹

2001

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lynne huffer is Professor of French Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rice University. She is the author of Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1992) andMaternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford University Press, 1998). She is currently working on a book that explores the relationship between literature, ethics, and politics.

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Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be

Cited by 5 publications

References 23 publications

Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Towards an Ethics of Knowledge

“There is no Gomorrah”: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory

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