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Modernism/Modernity 9.3 (2002) 526-528



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Book Review

Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature:
From the Sublime to the Uncanny


Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny. David Ellison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 290. $59.95.

David Ellison's latest book is an exceptionally absorbing study of European modernism. Ellison investigates the beginnings of modernism in Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and its novelistic flowering in Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny is particularly important to the historical trajectory Ellison traces, and Ellison's chapter on das Unheimliche is one of the book's strongest, especially since the ideas he introduces there continue to gain resonance in the chapters that follow.

While Ellison's contribution to literary studies in European modernism is significant, this book will also appeal to scholars interested in ethics and aesthetics. Ellison's discussion of ethics is fascinating because it takes up virtually no practical ethical problems or dilemmas, but instead philosophically ponders what ethics can mean or be in relation to aesthetics. Most often this relation is turbulent: an aesthetic frame that fails to contain and domesticate dangerous ethical content (as in Conrad and Gide), or writing about ethics that becomes distracted by rhetorical beauty (as in Kant). One of my few problems with the book is that so little attention is given to [End Page 526] the way that aesthetics can support or even accomplish an ethics, the way it can work—albeit with "unruly" energy—to foster moral meaning. Ellison either does not see this happening in modernist texts as he reads them, or he is simply less interested in such interdependence (perhaps because plenty of critical commentary already illuminates this perspective). But as the aesthetic and the ethical melt into one another the abstraction of his argument can be bewildering. At one point the question is, "Can the ethical frame the aesthetic, or will the aesthetic in its unruly materiality and resistance to all enclosure constantly 'spill out' and undermine the stability of Sittlichkeit?" while at another point, it involves "the resistance of the threatening ethical content . . . to aesthetic . . . enclosure" (40, 177). Stability sometimes adheres in a text's ethics, other times in its aesthetics. The indeterminacy of the two terms seems to be part of Ellison's point. The tension between them paradoxically dissolves the distinction, as one infects the other.

Infection seems to me an apt metaphor because Ellison writes about the transgression of boundaries—between ethics and aesthetics, the poetic and the theoretical, metaphor and metonymy, the sublime and the uncanny, the tragic and the impersonal—as inevitably dark and disturbing. Proust and Kafka "lived with the discomfort of knowing that [in the fairy tale world of their fiction] . . . all is (unfortunately) possible" (158). The dissolving of rules and lines of demarcation is less liberating than anxiety provoking. The uncanny is, after all, "that strange but familiar place where only death is at home" (84). But I should immediately add that the tone and spirit of Ellison's writing is not at all dark; on the contrary, it conveys an infectious vitality, exuberance, and sheer delight in this literature's intricacy and depth (both philosophically and psychologically). Perhaps this is another paradox of aesthetics: its capacity to represent accurately what is painful while removing the sting and affording us pleasure. Ellison is a nimble, engaging stylist and an ingenious thinker, and as a result his book is always pleasurable to read, even when it is contemplating "solipsism" in Conrad, "sadistic desire" in Gide, "the guilt associated with being a bachelor" in Kierkegaard and Kafka, and "threatening undercurrents" in Woolf (175, 181, 46, 190). It is even pleasurable when it is disabusing readers more sanguine than Ellison himself of their "wishful thinking" (173, 217).

All of the chapters combine bold theoretical points with close attention to detail, imagery, and nuance. Ellison is particularly adept at weaving into...

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