Ethics and Poetics Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives Edited by Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion and Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives, Edited by Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion and Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5641-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5641-6 For our mothers, þórdís and Галина CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................... ix INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... xi Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion and Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva Part I Ethics of Literary Language CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................... 3 Fiction’s Paradigmatic Alterity: José Saramago on the Ethics of the Literary Efrat Bloom CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................ 31 Failures of the Imagination: Art, Ethics, and Politics in Samuel Beckett and John Banville Eoghan Smith CHAPTER THREE .................................................................................... 55 Ridiculously Ethnic?: Othering and Counterstrategies in Contemporary Novels Therese-M. Meyer Part II Ethical Transvaluations CHAPTER FOUR ...................................................................................... 81 Ashamed of Who I Am: Levinas and Diasporic Subjectivity in Salman Rushdie’s Shame Zlatan Filipovic CHAPTER FIVE ...................................................................................... 107 Recognizing the Ache of the Other: Jonathan Franzen’s Reasons for Bothering Catharine Walker Bergström viii Contents Part III Ethics and Sociality CHAPTER SIX .......................................................................................... 137 “The Feminine Exception”: Shaping Observances in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion CHAPTER SEVEN .................................................................................. 163 Fragile Fictions: Ethics and Politics in Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai Julia Hoydis CHAPTER EIGHT .................................................................................. 195 Ethics, Affect, and the Traumatic Sublime in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage Eric Dean Rasmussen Part IV Ethics of Intermediality CHAPTER NINE ..................................................................................... 229 Fiction and Historical Memory: Negotiating the Traumatizing Image of the Falling Man Sandra Singer CHAPTER TEN ....................................................................................... 251 Showing the “Unshowable?”: A Generation of Mainstream Films on the Shoah Matthew Feldman CHAPTER ELEVEN .............................................................................. 273 Curating Art, Rewriting World History: Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology (1934) Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS ................................................. 301 INDEX ........................................................................................................ 305 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS On its way to completion, this collection of essays has been sustained by the creative and collaborative efforts of scholars around the globe. The incipient idea was aired during a conversation between the editors in a café in Uppsala, and then expanded and evolved as exciting proposals answered our call for contributions to a volume. In the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and Norway, our authors have attended to and shaped the ethico-social tenets of this enterprise, each one thoughtfully expressing the powers inherent in art and literature to affect nurturing, sustainable communities. In fact, the dedication of these authors to their scholarly tasks and their cooperative spirit are woven into and strengthen the ethos of this book. The editors want also to extend gratitude to their respective university departments for their support and encouragement during the time of this project: the Department of English, Stockholm University, and the Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg. Special thanks are due to the Gothenburg department which funded additional copy-editing of the book and to our gracious and expert proofreader, Daniel Ogden. During the first stages of formulating the central topics of this book, Eric Dean Rasmussen’s keen editorial and stylistic sense was very much appreciated. Special mention is reserved for Carol Koulikourdi, at Cambridge Scholar Publishing, for generously assisting the editors during the various stages of production. INTRODUCTION MARGRÉT GUNNARSDÓTTIR CHAMPION AND IRINA RASMUSSEN GOLOUBEVA IN THE EDITOR’S COLUMN of the January 2012 PMLA issue, Simon Gikandi reflects on the defining traits of literary aesthetics and on the challenging, never satisfactorily resolved, question whether literature has an ethical mandate, a power to transform and lead to “a path to immeasurable freedom through sometimes violent encounters” (20). Gikandi locates the power of literature in poetic language that “begs a response” rather than leaving us “speechless or inarticulate” (15). Participating in this discussion, vitally emerging out of the turn to ethics in the 1990s and following contemporary developments in ethical criticism, this volume of essays, Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives, explores the ethico-political dimensions of literary texts through the dynamics between singular literary spaces and the social habitus of modernity. Our point of departure is the dialectical tradition of ethical thought as it has evolved in and after the Hegelian understanding of community as intersubjective co-existence. For Hegel, the community, in its global conception, is not a coercive force external to the solitary individuals it unites; rather, the community is immanent to people, emerging from their interrelatedness. Thus, ethics in the dialectical tradition proceeds from acts of mutual recognition, from how we live and relate to each other, but also from how we interpret our social responsibilities and voice our political commitments. This collection of essays probes the modalities of such acts, foregrounding how modern and postmodern narratives contest the tendencies of other discourses—historical, political, psychological—to elide difference and eclipse the very radicality of re-cognition as transformative knowledge of self and other. The authors of Ethics and Poetics attempt to clarify how modern xii Introduction and postmodern narratives refine readers’ understanding of the recursive process of recognition, thereby opening up obstructed socio-political dimensions in literature and art. For ease of reference, the collection is divided into four sections— “Ethics of Literary Language,” “Ethical Transvaluations,” “Ethics and Sociality,” and “Ethics of Intermediality”—with chapters in each section gathered around identifying alternative epistemologies, which can be activated from the novel acts of re-cognitions in modern and postmodern fictional modes. The sections are interrelated, and readers are encouraged to make intellectual and topical connections. Although the essays differ in their methodologies, they share an interest in the current understanding of literary ethics and in investigating how an ethical transformation might be precipitated through the processes of literary creation, reading, social impact, and circulation. The first section, “Ethics of Literary Language,” is concerned with ethical acts in fiction which involve language as a signifying phenomenon rather than concrete articulation. In a variety of ways, the three essays in this section show how the socio-political subtexts of communication in modern and postmodern narratives are activated through the intimations of affective, intuitive, and poetic understanding as well as through the skeptical aesthetics of writers such as Samuel Beckett and John Banville. The three contributions effectively suggest how ethical recognitions, emerging in José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Amitav Ghosh’s A Sea of Poppies, Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, and John Banville’s “Art Trilogy,” invite new modes of compassionate cognition. In the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, this com-passion is neither altruism nor identification but “the disturbance of violent relatedness” (xiii). In the second section, “Ethical Transvaluations,” two contributions explore how the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, through “altered readings,” activates the political latency of fiction. Literary interpretations inflected