Introduction: the turn to ethics in the 1990s

Summary

This volume starts from the perception that in ‘advanced’ literary circles for most of the 1970s and 1980s, few topics could have been more uninteresting, more dépassé, less likely to attract budding young theorists, than the topic Ethics and Literature. For most of that period, explicit ‘ethical criticism’, to borrow Wayne Booth's phrase, had ‘fallen on hard times’. I will say nothing about what Booth might have regarded as the good times for ethical criticism, the 1950s and 1960s, that period when straw dinosaurs walked the earth – we are perhaps still too close to those times to say anything useful about them. On the other hand, there is reason to think that, at the more humble level of undergraduate pedagogy at least, ethical criticism has continued on among us alive and well. Frederic Jameson, one of the most vehement critics of ethical interests in literature, said fifteen years ago that when most teachers or students of literature ask of a novel or a poem, ‘What does it mean?’, the predominant ‘code’ in terms of which an answer is expected is the ‘ethical’. ‘What does Lord Jim mean?’, for example, is a coded demand that we talk about the moral conficts of the hero. Jameson's point is that literature, even the latest novel, always comes to us through what he calls ‘sedimented reading habits and categories developed by … inherited interpretive traditions’.