Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies during past dozen years, announces Laurence Buell in his introductory essay to January 1999 special issue of PMLA on Ethics and Literary Study. As he goes on in following pages to map distinctive contours of this still imprecisely defined movement, Buell is increasingly convincing that groundswell of valenced critical may be building to paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for 1970s and historicism for (7). There is a problem, though, and Buell acknowledges as much. That problem is politics: Perhaps touchiest single issue for both exemplars and critics of ethical turn is issue of whether it boils down, whatever nominal agenda, to a privatization of human relations that makes social and political secondary. (14) The vexed relationship between political (social imperatives) and ethical (privatized relations) is one that also characterizes sentimental literature of eighteenth century. Since 1980s in particular, with growth of politicized criticism informed by Marxist and feminist theory, sentimental literature has been read as a site of conflict that both exposes social problems resulting from economic and cultural iniquities and avoids articulating demand for large-scale reform through what could be called rhetorical fallacy of (individual) feeling heart. (1) Laurence Sterne poses a special problem in terms of political/ethical divide. While it is true that Sterne's scenes of sentiment feature power relations that place his male protagonists (Tristram, Yorick, Toby, and Trim) in sympathetic alliance with bird, ass, dwarf, slave, injured soldier, and fly, most such scenes involve a moment of sympathetic exchange between male character and a young woman (usually a stranger). And, while sensual contact stimulates all moments of sentimental connection in Sterne's work, they do so to more ethically problematic effect when Beguine foments Trim's knee or when Yorick counts beats of grisset's pulse than they do when Toby releases a fly or when Yorick responds to cry of a caged starling. Acute sensitivity between men and women in Sterne's fiction seems driven, by Sterne's own design, as much by prurience as by innocence. Sterne's sentimental signature is ambiguity; however, political readings of these scenes of psychosexual attraction, readings that emphasize presence of male sexual aggression, tend to find ambiguity less real than imagined, less persuasive than convenient. In this essay I wish to reintroduce, as it were, an awareness of earnest longing that imbues such scenes, not to deny their prurience but to recognize that their power derives as much from ethical sincerity as from political skepticism. Levinas and Female Other There is mounting evidence, Buell suggests, that Emmanuel Levinas is the most central theorist for postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century literary-ethical inquiry (9). Levinas's insistence that obligation to other takes precedence over being itself radically alters politicized reading of relation. According to Levinas, other has first claim on self through difference that is never absorbed or dominated or totalized (to use Levinasian vocabulary) by that self. If political self needs other for definition, ethical self, according to Levinas, needs other for transcendence. A recent issue of The Eighteenth Century has demonstrated how work of Levinas opens up ethical dimensions of texts ranging from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; same issue includes articles comparing philosophies of Levinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant. …