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Ethics and Literary Practice • Adam Zachary Newton Zachary • Adam Ethics and Literary Practice Literary and Ethics • Adam Zachary Newton Ethics and Literary Practice Edited by Adam Zachary Newton Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Humanities www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Ethics and Literary Practice Ethics and Literary Practice Special Issue Editor Adam Zachary Newton MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Special Issue Editor Adam Zachary Newton University Professor Emeritus, Yeshiva University USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special issues/ethics). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03928-504-4 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03928-505-1 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Ryuta Lida (Artwork) and Shin Suzuki (Photograph). c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Preface to “Ethics and Literary Practice” ................................ ix Adam Zachary Newton Introduction: Alienated Majesty: On Reading as Othering Reprinted from: Humanities 2020, 9, 16, doi:10.3390/h9010016 .................... 1 Steven B. Katz Ethics and Time: After the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 185, doi:10.3390/h8040185 .................... 17 Richard Deming Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 98, doi:10.3390/h8020098 .................... 23 Mette Blok Endlessly Responsible: Ethics as First Philosophy in Stanley Cavell’s Invocation of Literature Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 114, doi:10.3390/h8020114 .................... 35 Josephine Donovan Ethical Mimesis and Emergence Aesthetics Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 102, doi:10.3390/h8020102 .................... 45 Donald R. Wehrs Interlocutors, Nonhuman Actors, and the Ethics of Literary Signification Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 108, doi:10.3390/h8020108 .................... 55 Hille Haker Towards a Decolonial Narrative Ethics Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 120, doi:10.3390/h8030120 .................... 71 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi Reading (with) Hannah Arendt: Aesthetic Representation for an Ethics of Alterity Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 155, doi:10.3390/h8040155 ....................103 Eugene O’Brien ‘A Pause for Po-Ethics’: Seamus Heaney and the Ethics of Aesthetics Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 138, doi:10.3390/h8030138 ....................121 Thomas Claviez Neorealism, Contingency, and the Linguistic Turn Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 176, doi:10.3390/h8040176 ....................137 Adia Mendelson-Maoz The Fallacy of Analogy and the Risk of Moral Imperialism: Israeli Literature and the Palestinian Other Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 119, doi:10.3390/h8030119 ....................153 Michelle Boulous Walker Affect and Porosity: Ethics and Literature between Teresa Brennan and Hel´ ene` Cixous Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 160, doi:10.3390/h8040160 ....................171 v Jay Rajiva The Answer is Paracritical: Caribbean Literature and The Limits of Critique Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 126, doi:10.3390/h8030126 ....................189 Cynthia R. Wallace Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 164, doi:10.3390/h8040164 ....................201 Steven B. Katz Sonic Rhetorics as Ethics in Action: Hidden Temporalities of Sound in Language(s) Reprinted from: Humanities 2020, 9, 13, doi:10.3390/h9010013 ....................217 vi About the Special Issue Editor Adam Zachary Newton. Now Emeritus, Adam Zachary Newton was University Professor, Chair of the English Department, and Stanton Chair in Literature and Humanities at Yeshiva University from 2007-2014. Prior to that, he held appointments at the University of Texas at Austin in English, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Jewish Studies as the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor. More recently, he has held appointments as Distinguished Visiting Professor as at Emory University and Agnes Scott College. A cross-disciplinary scholar, he has written and taught at the boundaries of three knowledge practices: literary studies, philosophy, and religion. Alongside essays in a range of fields, he is the author of six monographs: Jewish Studies as Counterlife: A Report to the Academy (Fordham, 2019); To Make the Hands Impure: Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy (Fordham, 2014); The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance: Reading Literary Memoir from East-Central Europe and the Levant (Wisconsin, 2005); The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowtz, and Israel Among the Nations (SUNY, 2001); Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in 20th-Century America (Cambridge, 1998); and his award-winning first book, Narrative Ethics (Harvard, 1995), which first formalized the term for a developing sub-field. vii Preface to “Ethics and Literary Practice” As a resurgent theoretical trend in humanities scholarship now in its fourth decade (cf. Nussbaum 1985, Miller 1987, Booth 1988, Siebers 1988, Phelan 1989, Newton 1995, McCance 1996, Eaglestone 1997, Posner 1997, Altieri 1998, Adamson, Freadman, Parker 1998, Attridge 1999, Buell 1999, Gibson 1999, Garber, Hanssen, Walkowitz 2000, Davis and Womack 2001, George 2005, Attridge 2006, Levine 2009, Rossiter 2010, Altes 2014, Biwu 2014, Gregory 2019, Serpell 2014, Kingwell 2014, Doran 2017, Meretoja and David, 2018), “ethics and literary practice” names an inquiry that remains productively open to question. This special issue of Humanities explores intersections between its organizing concepts as provocations rather than givens within a range of fields, heuristic frames, analytical categories, and discourses. Take the following as illustrative. 1. “[I]insofar as we take literature to be ethically significant in an exemplary way, we may want to start thinking about locating its ethical force not so much in its referential makeup and thematics as in, among other things, what I would call, for lack of a better term, its discursive transformational “capaciousness,” that is, in its ability to absorb and transform virtually any kind of discourse, including the discourse of ethics” (Eskin, 2004). 2. “How to think of ethics? Can one think of ethics? As the locus of otherness, ethics seems to lack integrity ‘in itself,’ and perhaps ought to be considered a matrix, a hub from which various discourses, concepts, terms, energies, fan out, and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter the other, all the others. E]thics exerts whatever force it does by virtue of its singular capacity to adhere to, affiliate with, bury itself in, provoke, or dislodge other discourses; ethics realizes its full creative potential not in ‘itself’ but as a kind of x-factor, a bracingly alien incitement to inquiry and discrimination” (Harpham, 1999). Each of these meta-statements lays claim to either ethics or literature as the more multiplicative factor, the integer that boasts coefficient pride of place. A conjunction as ancient as any topic in the philosophical tradition evidently remains just as protean and generative for post-traditional thought—perhaps even more so. Traditionally, ethical questions about literary practice have taken the form of, “is this book morally praiseworthy?”; or, “does this character model virtue and the good life?”; or, “does that story satisfactorily emplot life’s moral complexity?”; or, “has my reading of this text enlarged or deepened me?” More recently, such problematics have been formulated as questions about otherness and witnessing, i.e., how are readers obliged for responsible to what they read (Attridge 2006)? What, in turn, do such texts owe their readers as imaginative vehicles for the representation and productive misrepresentation of reality? How, accordingly, do texts remain answerable to themselves, to their own formal, and deforming, dictates? How does the act of reading train or practice answerability? Which modality of reading, say, symptomatic vs. surface (Best and Marcus, 2009), am I being called upon to exercise and report on, and how do they differ, ethically speaking? Do I read alone or in company? How is the question of ethics also a question of politics: or are these different questions? How might such concerns be adapted for other kinds or orders of textuality, say, the scriptural and religious, or for photography and cinema, which utilize an alternative “grammar or ethics of seeing” (Sontag, 1977)? Loss, accord, appeal, wound, insomnia, touch: what does literary reading make happen? How exactly does a text “advene” (Barthes,
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