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

Cynthia R Wallace

doi:10.3390/h8040164

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy
Even more crucially, which texts we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics makes all the difference in the world, a point we would do well to remember as the conversation continues
Miller (2015) himself has recently denied much reason for teaching literature apart from pleasure and perhaps the capacity to spot fake news, I would argue that an ethics of literary attention explores the relationship between reader and text in part to suss out the possibilities of reading as an exercise that develops our capacity to attend in general

Summary

Theorizing

Scholars have devoted significant effort to mapping the so-called ethical turn in literary studies that gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century (see Buell 1999; Gibson 2005; Eskin 2004; Eaglestone 2004). Miller (2015) himself has recently (and rather cynically) denied much reason for teaching literature apart from pleasure and perhaps the capacity to spot fake news, I would argue that an ethics of literary attention explores the relationship between reader and text in part to suss out the possibilities of reading as an exercise that develops our capacity to attend in general Such an approach returns us not just to Emmanuel Levinas and to Simone Weil, who famously argues in Waiting for God (Weil 1973) that “school studies”, even geometry homework, can train students’ capacity to attend to both God in prayer and a suffering other. Western philosophy may not be the only or best source for thinking about ethics

Attending

Witnessing

Relearning