The Ethics of Interpretation and the International Division of Intellectual Labor

Abstract

Much of the work produced in recent years on the relationship between ethics and literature has responded to two major concerns: on the one hand, the possible or desirable role of literature as a source for ethical theory (Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge; Williams; McIntyre) and, on the other, the contribution of ethically-informed perspectives to the understanding of literature (Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge; Booth; Parker; Newton). Philosophers in search of alternative models of ethical agency have found much from which to profit in the examination of literature, especially prose fiction, and in parallel fashion ethically-oriented critics have added a new dimension to their interpretive task by incorporating the philosophical tradition of ethical inquiry, especially the Kantian and post-Kantian. However, on both sides of the disciplinary divide the dialogue with the developments of literary theory in the past decades has been, to say the least, problematic. Viewed with suspicion by both moral philosophers and ethical critics, contemporary literary theory is often cast as responsible for the bracketing of ethical concerns in literary studies. The purpose of this article is to map out this unhappy marriage between ethics and literary theory by inquiring into the conception of ethics entailed by the claim that critical theory has been oblivious to ethical concerns. Since this stems at least partially from a confrontation between various national traditions, philosophical and otherwise, and since ethical issues are increasingly being played out on an international arena, I will recast the problem within what I am calling "the international division of intellectual labor," an asymmetrical and hierarchical distribution of cognitive positions among different countries and regions of the globe. This will be argued primarily through the reading of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, which will place the ethical discussion in a pedagogical context, thus bringing me back to the potential contribution of critical theory to the formulation of an ethics of literary studies responsive to the aforementioned division of labor.