THE ETHICS IN LITERATURE Also by Andrew Hadfield LITERATURE, POLITICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Reformation to Renaissance WILDE FRUIT AND SALVAGE SOYL: Spenser's Irish Experience EDMUND SPENSER (editor) REPRESENTING IRELAND: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 (editor with Brendan Bradshaw and Willy Maley) STRANGERS TO THAT LAND: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (editor with John McVeagh) EDMUND SPENSER: A View of the State of Ireland (editor with Willy Maley) Also by Dominic Rainsford AUTHORSHIP, ETHICS AND THE READER: Blake, Dickens, Joyce CRITICAL ETHICS: Text, Theory and Responsibility (editor with Tim Woods) Also by Tim Woods CRITICAL ETHICS: Text, Theory and Responsibility (editor with Dominic Rainsford) 'I'M TELLING YOU STORIES': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (editor with Helena Grice) The Ethics in Literature Edited by Andrew Hadfield Professor of English Department of English and American Studies University of Wales Aberystwyth Dominic Rainsford Lecturer Department of English University of Aarhus Denmark and Tim Woods Lecturer Department of English and American Studies University of Wales Aberystwyth First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-27363-8 ISBN 978-1-349-27361-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27361-4 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21653-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The ethics in literature / edited by Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21653-5 (cloth) 1. Didactic literature, English-History and criticism. 2. Didactic literature, American-History and criticism. 3. American literature-History and criticism. 4. Ethics in literature. I. Rainsford, Dominic, 1965- . II. Hadfield, Andrew. III. Woods, Tim. PR408.D49E84 1998 820.9'384-dc21 98-24314 CIP Selection and editorial matter © Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods 1999 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics 1 Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods Part 1: Self and History 15 1 Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen 17 Spender's World Within World Richard Freadman 2 'Ethics cannot afford to be nation-blind': Saul 38 Bellow and the Problem of the Victim Andrew Hadfield 3 Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations 52 of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction Norman Ravvin Part II: Agency and Responsibility 71 4 The Unbearable Lightness of Acts 73 Valeria Wagner 5 Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic 86 Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad's The Secret Agent Ruth Kolani 6 John Cheever's The Swimmer and the Abstract 101 Standpoint of Kantian Moral Philosophy Rebecca Hughes and Kieran O'Hara v vi Contents Part III: Literature, Interpretation and Ethics 117 7 Understanding and Ethics in Coleridge: 119 Description, Evaluation and Otherness David P. Haney 8 Derrida, Rushdie and the Ethics of Mortality 136 Chris McNab 9 'Role Models', Conversation and the Ethical Drive 152 Ian MacKillop Part IV: Sympathy for the Other 167 10 Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Michele 169 Roberts's In the Red Kitchen: Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical Susan Rowland 11 Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin 184 Andrew Gibson 12 Moral Capacities and Other Constraints 212 Cristina Mejia Part V: Public Morality 229 13 'Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings': 231 Catachresis in Kant and Coriolanus Ortwin de Graef 14 Literature and Existentialist Ethics in Simone 248 de Beauvoir's 'Moral Period' Terry Keefe 15 Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein 262 janis McLarren Caldwell Index 275 Acknowledgements The chapters in this volume are all adapted from papers given at the 'Literature and Ethics' conference at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in July 1996. We would like to thank all of the speak­ ers and other participants at the conference for helping to make it such an enjoyable and intellectually challenging event. We are also grateful for the financial support which the conference received from the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth Research Fund, and the Department of English of UWA. We would also like to thank Joan Crawford and June Baxter for their secretarial help in the prepara­ tion of the conference and this volume. Vll Notes on the Contributors Janis McLarren Caldwell is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where she teaches Literature and Science. She has an MD from Northwestern University Medical School (1984) and a PhD from the University of Washington (1996). Ortwin de Graef gained his PhD in Literature and Philosophy in 1990 at the Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven, where he is now Lecturer in English and Literary Theory. He also lectures in the Belgian Inter-University Postgraduate Programme in Literary Theory, and is a Research Associate of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. He is the author of two volumes on Paul de Man, Serenity in Crisis (1993) and Titanic Light (1995), and has published on Poe, Ernst Junger, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Jon Elster, Arnold, Charles Taylor, Derrida and Henry Rollins. Richard Freadman is Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University. He is the author of Eliot, James and the Fictional Self: A Study in Character and Narration (1986), co-editor (with Lloyd Reinhardt) of On Literary Theory and Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Encounter (1991), and (with Seumas Miller) author of Rethinking Theory: A Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and an Alternative Account (1992). He is co-editor (with Jane Adamson and David Parker) of a forthcoming book on recent developments in ethics, and is working on a study of ethics and autobiography. Andrew Gibson is Reader in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Course Director of the MA in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture. He is the author of Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (1990) and Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996), and editor of Pound in Multiple Perspective (1993), Reading Joyce's 'Circe' (1994) and Joyce's 'Ithaca' (1996). He co-edited Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture and the Politics of Cyberspace (1996) and Conrad and Theory (forthcoming, 1998). He is currently writing Redemptions: Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. viii Notes on the Contributors ix Andrew Hadfield, co-organiser of 'Literature and Ethics', gained his BA at the University of Leeds, and a DPhil at the University of Ulster. He is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His main research interests are in Anglo-Irish literary relations; literature and politics; and Renaissance poetry and prose. His publications include Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994) and 'Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl': Spenser's Irish Experience (1997). He is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. David P. Haney received his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. He has taught at Swarthmore College, and is currently the Hargis Associate Professor of English at Auburn University, Alabama, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation (1993) and has published articles, mostly on Wordsworth, in Studies in Romanticism, Style, Clio, the European Romantic Review, and other journals. Rebecca Hughes has a BA in English and a DPhil in Linguistics from the University of Oxford. She is currently Deputy Director of the Centre for English Language Education at the University of Nottingham. Aside from her academic work, she is a past winner of the Greenwich Poetry Festival Prize, and of the Bridport Arts Centre Short Story Prize. She is the author of English in Speech and Writing: Investigating Language and Literature (1996). Terry Keefe studied at the Universities of Leicester and London. He was Head of French and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Leicester until1988. Since then, he has been Professor of French Studies and Head of Modern Languages at Lancaster University. He has published two books on Simone de Beauvoir, and one on moral perspectives in the existentialist fiction of Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir, and has co-edited books on Zola and existentialist auto­ biography. He is currently working on the early ethics of Sartre. Ruth Kolani is a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and of the City College of New York, and received her MA at Hunter College, CUNY.