Introduction

Summary

Most recent studies of the ethics and politics of literary theory focus on the polemical issues of literary value, multiculturalism, or canons. The assumption of this book is that these questions cannot be fruitfully posed until we examine the theoretical commitments that drive discussions of textual politics. The commitments that I will address concern the relationships among language, subjectivity, and ethics. The influence of these commitments in contemporary debate can be seen in two assumptions made by most literary theory: (1) since any positive theory of the good life (good book) is necessarily ethnocentric, we should concern ourselves only with the political values of justice and negative freedom (freedom from social structures); (2) since the subject is a decentered site where social and linguistic forces converge, there can be no constructing ethical subject but only a constructed political subject. This is, of course, a simplification of the many positions I will examine in detail, but it captures enough of the problem for me to put the goals of this book on the table right away: to show how theory has boxed us into these unproductive positions and then to develop a way around the double impasse so that we can enrich the way we theorize textual value and read literary works. We do not need to decide what the canon is or what a good book is but rather to understand what is crippling our critical dialogue and how to find the resources to improve it.