Introduction: The Double "Turn" to Ethics and Literature?

The contemporary revival, in parts of the humanities, of a strong interest in the question of "ethics and literature" has recently celebrated its twentieth birthday. Two decades after "ethics and literature" went public—with New Literary History's pioneering special issue "Literature and/as Moral Philosophy" (1983)—we can look back on what has unquestionably consolidated into a burgeoning subdiscipline, an academic venture yielding ever-increasing intellectual dividends on the shares initially supplied by Martha Nussbaum's "Flawed Crystals" (1983), J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading (1987), Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep (1988), and Tobin Siebers's The Ethics of Criticism (1988), among others.¹ Such authors as Richard Rorty (1989), Simon Critchley (1992), Samuel Goldberg (1993), Dawne McCance (1996), Robert Eaglestone (1997), Colin McGinn (1997), Jill Robbins (1999), William Waters (2003), and Derek Attridge (2004)—to name only a few—have all bought, in one way or another, into the erstwhile start-up company. Their combined efforts have signaled what has come to be perceived and referred to as a "turn to ethics" in literary studies and, conversely, a "turn to literature" in (moral) philosophy.²

Certainly, this double turn can be seen as a function of intra- as well as interdisciplinary developments. One may read the turn to ethics in literary studies as a "reaction against the [putative] formalism . . . of deconstruction" (Phelan 2001: 107) and the growing influence of such thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas—especially in the wake of the "de Man controversy" in the late 1980s—and relate it to broader institutional developments, such as the "continuing power of feminist criticism and theory and the rising influence of African American, [postcolonial,] multicultural, and queer criticism and theory, all of which ground themselves in sets of ethico-political commitments" (ibid.).³ Concomitantly, the literary turn in contemporary, especially Anglo-American, philosophy—most pointedly articulated in Rorty's (1999 [1989]: xvi) "general turn against theory and toward narrative"—can be viewed as a homologous response to the putative formalism of analytical moral theory in favor of a more Aristotelian—eudaimonistic and aretaic—approach to human existence as it is played out by singular persons in specific situations, which are, so the claim goes, best illuminated in and through works of literature.⁴

The presumed explanatory force and perceived causal immediacy of certain historical conditions notwithstanding, however, what may have felt or seemed like a turn at the time appears, from the vantage point of the present, more like a noticeable turbulence in the path of modern intellectual history than a (radical) veering off from hitherto accepted intellectual practices implied in the notion of "turn." This is not by any means to derogate from or diminish the achievements of ethical critics over the past couple of decades, nor is it to postulate a squarely continuous view of history, thereby playing into the hands of conservatism. It is simply to forestall a falsely progressivist assessment of the current state of affairs in the "ethics and literature" debate based on a facile notion of innovation by being mindful, twenty years and a slew of publications on the subject later, of such facts as that philosophy—of which ethics is a branch, of course—and (the study of) literature have been more or less overtly enmeshed since, at the very least, Plato's reflections on the subject;⁵ that the problem of "ethics and literature" has been explicitly addressed, in the twentieth century, for one, on more than one occasion, as when, long before the rise of contemporary ethical criticism, Kurt Pinthus (1920: xii) diagnosed a "momentous turn toward the ethical [große Hinwendung zum Ethischen]" in the works of those responding to the upheavals of World War I and its aftermath;⁶ and finally, that the indelible, if complex and at times covert, interface of the ethical and the literary has been "uncovered" even in the allegedly most...