The Difficulty of Ethics/The Ethics of Difficulty
As an aspect of textual and critical strategies and as a target of
modernist critique, the discourse of ethics figures as a deep anxiety in the
diverse projects of literary modernism. While the recent "ethical turn" in
criticism has reasserted 'readerly' commitments to characterization,
history, and humanist values, the modernist project of an ethics that
obtains in the reading of 'writerly' texts -- a postulate crucial to a
variety of difficult modernist works and their claim that difficulty is
_valuable_-- remains undeveloped precisely because it brings the
very structure of commitment into question. Can modernist reading and
the ethical ever coincide if modernism endlessly produces ambivalence?
Can a commitment to difficulty resist a "moralistic turn" in reading?
Abstract and cv by March 20 to:
Kriss Basil &/or Nick LoLordo
(kbasil@fas.harvard.edu; lolordo@fas.harvard.edu
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