Ethics of Reading Research Papers (original) (raw)

This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan's short... more

This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box". In doing so I make a case for the literary as a useful mode for being and teaching in classrooms, and for the literariness of the lives caught up in those classrooms. I examine various properties of the text, including the story's unusual form, the implications of its content and genre, the narrative voice, and the central metaphor of a black box. Reading through these, I consider how the story came to shape my imagination and practice as an English teacher. A final section considers the limitations of such a formalist approach to close reading, exploring how a novel framing of close reading as relational work makes ethical readings (Gallop, 2000) possible. The paper concludes with an analysis of the implications of that approach to reading and advances resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers interested in thinking about the relationship among teachers, students, and texts.

H as postcolonial literary criticism been affected by the postcritical antihistoricist turn? The short answer is no. It is hard to imagine what an antihistoricist postcolonial literary criticism might look like, since any investment in... more

H as postcolonial literary criticism been affected by the postcritical antihistoricist turn? The short answer is no. It is hard to imagine what an antihistoricist postcolonial literary criticism might look like, since any investment in the term postcolonial assumes a simultaneous commitment to history and politics. While the term from its inception has been subject to criticism, it continues to hold its own despite more recent terms like global and world. While they may signal a postpostcolonial turn, a term initially used by Erin O'Connor (2003) to critique postcolonial analyses of Victorian novels, the use of and engagement with the postcolonial still provide a methodological challenge to modes of criticism advanced under the global and the world. Postcolonial literary criticism remains attuned to questions of aesthetics and ethics, and key theorists like Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Edward W. Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak continue to have an impact on the field. This does not mean that the field is static or that we are exactly where we were in the 1980s and 1990s; it means that the particular political conditions under which literature is produced, circulated, and read can never be dismissed. In his Ethics of Reading J. Hillis Miller (1987: 4) argues that to speak of the "ethics of reading" is to move beyond the "politics of interpretation" to "the real situation of a man or a woman reading a book, teaching a class, writing a critical essay." For a good postcolonial literary critic, the politics of interpretation does not reside only in the intellectual mastery of the political and social contexts of a given literary text for mere hermeneutical pleasure. It lies equally in the expression and conveyance of that interpretation through the actual reading of the work to "show how the adduced historical context inheres in the fine grain of its language"

In May 2014, a sermon touting Abraham's faithfulness to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22) inspired a Florida woman to " go and do likewise, " killing a two-year old child she was helping to raise, attempting to kill the child's... more

In May 2014, a sermon touting Abraham's faithfulness to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22) inspired a Florida woman to " go and do likewise, " killing a two-year old child she was helping to raise, attempting to kill the child's ten-year old brother and then herself. The latter were unsuccessful. Asserting, " God did not stop me " as her defense, she faces first-degree murder charges. A similar story took place in California story some twenty years earlier. In the last ten years, Family Guy parodies, video games, plays and dramas (Eye of God, 2009), Holocaust paintings and reflection (Samuel Bak's " Grandfather's Gift "), and critical commentary (e.g. Carol Delaney's book Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth) have wrestled with grisly and disturbing behaviors such as filicide and " faith-gone-wrong, " related to this iconic biblical story. Rooted in Arthur Frank's dialogic narrative theory, I read Genesis 22 in conversation with its afterlives in recent filicides and other representations in literature, drama, gaming, and video. The goal is to explore how the story's afterlives in pop-culture and unfortunate recent events provide helpful wisdom for responsible readings of the Akedah.

On the online Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology (compiled by Alber, Nielsen, Richardson and Iversen) http://projects.au.dk/narrativeresearchlab/unnatural/undictionary/ under the entry “TELLABILITY, UNNATURAL,” we learn the following: “Many texts resist, reject, or sabotage conventional expectations of tellability, or the interest generated in the reader to learn what happens next in a story. A classic example is Beckett’s The Unnamable, occasionally referred to as The Unreadable for this reason.” This presentation will consider a quite differently angled category: texts whose authorial idiosyncrasy—including extreme or exorbitant length—raise questions about the limits—and consequently, ethics—of reading, which cut athwart each of the approaches codified and outlined in in the Core Concepts and Critical Debates volume (Warhol, Herman, Richardson, Phelan-Rabinowitz). What does the “ethics of reading” signify here? A doing justice to both the text at hand and the customary, albeit no less singular situation we call “reading.” The two texts I plan to discuss are the eccentric 17 million word Inman Diary and Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal, which, with his autobiographical writings, total 30 thousand pages. The latter instance, additionally, represents a tactile immediacy—in the work’s uniquely embodied form as object or relic—that I identify, on analogy with scripture, by the ethical construct, “the book-in-hand.”

Agnes Scott College, Distinguished Kirk Scholar Lecture

The very word “theory” presupposes a difference between literary ideas and literary form. This is a mistake, since any distinction between the two aspects of literature only underlines their connection. Casting theory as a Lyotardian... more

The very word “theory” presupposes a difference between literary ideas and literary form. This is a mistake, since any distinction between the two aspects of literature only underlines their connection. Casting theory as a Lyotardian meta-narrative explaining the mystery of the aesthetic prompts a longing for a return of the repressed object of study, literature itself. In this regard, any impulse to return literature to the centre of literary studies has to be seen as the necessary consequence of institutional forces that co-opt theory “as a university discipline or field of study” by divorcing its content from its style and turning its insights into a centre of meaning for literary texts (Docherty 169-170).
This observation is something that we have to keep in mind when thinking of possible outsides to theory. One of theory's insights is that the notion of a pure aesthetic is problematic: “The Laugh of the Medusa”, for instance, suggests that aesthetics, politics and sexuality are inextricable. That a lot of critical theory has been written in a poetic style is a testament to the power of the aesthetic as well as a radical questioning of what both theory and literature is. Unfortunately, there has been insufficient acknowledgement of this collectively, and this has led to the view of theory as an easy solution to the many problems of interpretation posed by literature. Accordingly, theory has occupied an uneasy position vis-à-vis literature, the ramifications of which give rise to the concerns of this conference. A return to literary studies implies that theory is extrinsic to the real subject of study, literature. Such a view, however, ignores the insights about the aesthetic that theory has provided to us.
Therefore, I do not intend to move beyond presupposed boundaries of theory to return to another bounded notion of the aesthetic. Instead, I will undertake a critical investigation of the aporia that is brought to light in Derrida’s “This Strange Institution Called Literature” (the fact that the aesthetic is both a result of a particular method of reading and yet also something inherent to the style of the work) through a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death”. In my reading I will pay special attention to the literary devices that Benjamin employs, suggesting that we cannot ask for a return to studying literature without taking into account the insights that theory has provided to us -- to do so would support assumptions about the essence of literature. Rather, taking inspiration from Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, I hope to discover how this aporia, when cast in the light of a double-bind, allows us to discover a new mode of reading that escapes the traps of previous modes.

This article follows aspects of the current debate on racism as embodied in the AIDS-HIV controversy. It discusses President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS letter to world leaders in terms of the religious reality it invokes and his... more

This article follows aspects of the current debate on racism as embodied in the AIDS-HIV controversy. It discusses President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS letter to world leaders in terms of the religious reality it invokes and his reaction to opposition at home regarding his stance on ...