What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics

Abstract

Several interlocking influences must be taken into account if one is to begin to give a satisfactory answer to the question of Why ethics now?-Why ethics talk should lately have flourished in literary studies. First, to a considerable extent, it always has, although its chief traditional subgenres (the evaluation of aesthetic merit and the reading of literary texts as moral reflection) were thrown into disarray by the coeval perturbations of the theory revolution and canonical revisionism of the 1970s. Second, ethics talk, of certain kinds anyhow, has been relegitimated during the past dozen years by currents within high theory itself: by Foucault's revaluation of the category of the self, conceiving of care of the self as an ethical project; by the argument on behalf of deconstructive critical practice as itself an ethic; and by the emergence of Emmanuel Levinas as a postpoststructuralist model for literary-ethical inquiry2 Third, the turn by philosophers toward the literary as a preferred mode of ethical reflection, such as moral philosophy B la Martha Nussbaum and Richard Eldridge and postepistemological pragmatism B la Richard R ~ r t y . ~ Fourth, the ethics-in-theprofessions movement, which in medicine and law and other fields has turned to literature as exemplum and/or model.