... ): 365 –85. Arnold , Matthew . “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” 1864. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings . Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993 . 26 –51. Badiou , Alain . 1998. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil . Trans. Peter Hallward...

...Samuel Cross This essay closely examines Henry James's notion of “tact”—caution in what one says about others—treating the idea from an ethical perspective. I trace James's ethics of tact through his late The Wings of the Dove , arguing that the author holds himself to certain stringent standards...

...Peter D. McDonald When J. Hilllis Miller first coined the phrase “the ethics of reading” in the mid-1980s, it constituted a decisive intervention in the overheated debates about the merits of deconstruction, inaugurating the so-called ethical turn within Anglo-American literary studies. Yet it also...

...Christine Mahady This essay examines the ways in which depictions of animal and human corporeality in Jack London's fiction support an ethics concerned with cultivating a greater attunement to one's surroundings, including other bodies. In contrast to previous readings that understand London's...

...Clemens Spahr Banita Georgiana , Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 . ( Lincoln : U of Nebraska P , 2012 ), pp. 376 , cloth, $60.00 . Post-9/11 Literature and the Question of Ethics GEORGIANA BANITA, Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics...

...Carrol Clarkson © 2013 by Novel, Inc. 2013 Duke University Press J. M. Coetzee: Ethics, Politics, and Writing MIKE MARAIS, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 249, cloth, $72.00. PATRICK...

...Christopher Weinberger Much recent ethical criticism theorizes novels as becoming ethically effective through readers’ oscillation between immersion in mimetic worlds and subsequent reflection on that experience. Murakami Haruki, however, presents readers with irreducibly fictional realities that...

... unpublished notebooks and the Foe ur-text to argue that the novel proposes an impossible crossing, whereby key strategies we have used to value the genre—its capacity to summon countervoices or to invoke an ethical response to alterity—are shadowed by a radical question about the limits of our readerly...

...Yogita Goyal David Palumbo-Liu introduces his book, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age , with the simple statement that “this is a short book, meant to be almost a kind of primer” (xii). Its brief is to argue that reading contemporary literature can create an ethical...

... related rise of the novel and the emergence of the modern individual that the modest shift Brian Michael Norton undertakes in his new study comes as a breath of fresh air. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment is an admirably focused monograph that opens...

... the novel's ethics have been predicated upon its capacity to circulate otherness. Departing from these models, the essay revisits Erich Auerbach's claim that the contemporary novel would bear reference to “a common life.” And it considers alternative accounts of the ethics of culture in Lukács's and...

...Aarthi Vadde This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how...

...Penny Fielding This essay address the problem of action in William Godwin's writing, comparing his characterization of the ethical decision in An Enquiry concerning Political Justice with his much more uneasy rendering of it in Caleb Williams . The novel, coming between the two editions of...

... central statements of this philosophy are The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938), the latter of which I suggest is not merely an antiwar pamphlet (according to critical convention) but also an anti-programmatic ethical treatise for living what Michel Foucault calls “the non-fascist life.” Criticism...

... prototypical marriage plot but also to undermine one of the novel's principal ethical aims: to develop a capacity for sympathy among characters and readers. Compared with some other emotions, envy has received relatively little literary-critical attention, but its formative place in the psychoanalytic theory...

... Incredibly Close (set in New York City after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001), it examines the dictate that fiction about historical violence must perforce be true to the facts. This dictate aligns fidelity with ethics and sets as its stakes the dismaying implications of blurring the distinction...

... Romantic conceptions of literary originality that have narrowed the range of critical responses to Le manoir mystérieux largely to questions about the ethical repercussions of Houde's literary theft. Instead, she argues that Le manoir mystérieux is metonymous of a larger embattled, albeit creative, mode...

... entail. The text attempts to resolve this conflict by turning to magical realism as a formal device for obscuring the material effects of violence; in doing so, it reprises a liberal ethics in the way its representational form seeks to contain and moderate the politics of extremity. © 2011 by Novel...

... plural modernisms and yet retaining modernism as the field's key identifier. It suggests that there is an ethical oversight in doing so while repudiating the critical and aesthetic models that made the current field configuration possible. Contemporary modernist studies owe a debt to the newly minted...

...Lily Saint Abstract This essay challenges recent theories of world literature that argue that the global anglophone novel, in particular, instantiates empathic, ethical connection across and beyond nation-states. Taking cues from Teju Cole's Open City , it understands the urge to connect as a...