The Ethical (Re)Turn: A Metacritical Study of Turn-of-the-Century Literary Ethics

Abstract

This dissertation examines the "ethical turn" in Anglo-American literary studies, which first gained momentum around the 1980s and became widely established by the 21st century. The "ethical turn" marks the rise of ethical criticism, or the reading of literature through the lens of ethico-political efficacy, as contrasted with formalist or aestheticist modes of reading attentive to the 'text-in-itself'. The debate about literature's ethical, political, and instrumental value vis-à-vis its own autonomy and aesthetic value arguably reached a crisis point around the turn of the century, as enthusiasm for New Criticism and deconstructive criticism began to wane. Increasing disenchantment with these distinct but broadly formalist projects paved the way for critics like Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller and others to seek out new justifications for an ethically oriented criticism, one attuned to the text as an ethical, political, and social object. Though this "ethical turn" has evolved into a variety of critical practices since then, its underlying assumptions continue to persist in the many "ethics of" discourses which cut across disciplines as well as the variously political thematics of postcolonial, ecocritical, and feminist criticism familiar today.

My contribution to this broadly accepted historical account is to return to the "ethical turn" and some of its earliest proponents, in order to counter the widely held view that this 'turn' was really a radical departure from the formalist and poststructuralist modes of criticism that preceded it. I argue in this dissertation that the earliest critics partaking in this ethical turn, including Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, shared a set of ethical presuppositions in common with the formalist critics and poststructuralist critics to which they were opposed: namely, a position 'outside' ethics, or what Ronald Dworkin calls "external moral skepticism". Therefore, rather than cede to the model of historical rupture or break, I argue that the early 'ethical turn' was a subtler shift in valence: one that took the negative project of poststructuralist critique, or what Derrida calls an ethics of "letting be", and asserted it as a substantive moral position, even a normative prescription (Writing 141). Caught between the antinormative presuppositions of the postmodern episteme, the aestheticist's commitment to literary autonomy, and the felt need for an ethical intervention into literary criticism, these early ethical critics ultimately failed to resolve the entailing tensions, falling short of a coherent account of literary ethics. The resulting incoherence, I argue, has contributed to the paralytic situation for criticism recently diagnosed by Joseph North, in which criticism, premised on making judgments and interventions into culture, is subsumed by the passive, descriptive model of scholarship. Through a series of case studies and close engagements with the literary ethics of Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Dorothy Hale, and other key contributors to the ethical turn, my dissertation makes a metacritical case that an implicit ethical consensus - namely, an ethics based on nominalism, or the rejection of universals - has been the stumbling block preventing these critics from bridging ethical concern with attention to form, and foreclosing the more comprehensive 'aesth-ethical' criticism which they seek.