Translating Ethics
ACLA
April 11-14, 2002
This seminar proposes to rethink the relationship between literature and
ethics. More specifically, we will ask how ethics fits into our current
critical investments in historical analysis and ideological critique. The
relationship between literature and ethics has long occupied literary
critics, many of whom have claimed literature's ability to induce and to
shape ethical conditions. Wayne Booth, for instance, identifies literary
texts as moral guides and edifying friends (The Company We Keep, 1988).
Critics influenced by poststructuralist approaches to reading have
questioned the legitimacy of humanist approaches and have tended to bypass
ethics altogether in their critique of the universalizing underpinnings of
normative moral claims. Recent scholarship has tried to negotiate this
critique of humanism without falling into the trap of the posthumanist
suspicion of ethics. However, recent work on literature and ethics tends
to limit itself historically, culturally, and generically. By and large,
it privileges narrative over other literary forms (especially drama and
the lyric), and draws overwhelmingly on Anglo-American literature from the
modern period. Adam Zachary Newton, for instance, articulates a theory of
"narrative ethics" (Narrative Ethics, 1995) by claiming the unique ethical
status of narrative, but fails to consider how this understanding of
ethics might shift in a consideration of other modes of representation.
And a recent issue of PMLA entitled "Ethics and Literary Study" (vol.
114/1, January 1999) focuses primarily on modern Western authors.
We would like to create a forum for the discussion of ethical questions
across disciplinary, historical, and generic boundaries. Specifically, we
propose to rethink current assumptions about ethics by investigating their
usefulness in analyzing a wider spectrum of traditions and genres. For
example, are the sorts of moral questions or intersubjective states
induced by narrative the same as those induced by poetry or drama? How do
questions of genre frame the very conception of ethics? Can contemporary
ethical theory be used to discuss historical periods in which ethics is
cast in a very different light? Is the use of contemporary ethical theory
to analyze premodern texts an instance of anachronism or a productive form
of recontextualization? Our principal goal in organizing the panel will be
to ensure a diversity of approaches and backgrounds. Above and beyond
that, we will ask that seminar participants reflect the ways upon ethics
can be translated. We understand the word "translation" in its widest
sense as a movement across: movement across historical periods, cultural
and national frontiers, and the specific parameters of genre.
Please submit proposals by October 1, 2001 to Professor Noah Guynn. Email:
ndguynn@ucdavis.edu . Please cc: Kathleen Komar at Komar@ucla.edu .
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