Shadows of Ethics

by Harpham, Geoffrey Galt

• ISBN13: 9780822323204
• ISBN10: 0822323206
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

What place do ethical concerns have in intellectual life today? Why do ethical issues so often intrude in discussions of literature, criticism, and culture? And why are ethical issues so often unresolved? In short, why does ethics seem to be both urgent and problematic? In this book, the noted critic Geoffrey Galt Harpham seeks to transform the contemporary understanding of ethics by arguing that it not only "shadows" other discourses but is itself "shadowed." For Harpham, ethics is not a source of rules or norms, but a way of structuring questions. A conflicted discourse, ethics marks the point where literature becomes conceptually rigorous and theory becomes humanised. In addition to deeply original meditations on such subjects as rationality, aesthetics, and "enlightenment," Shadows of Ethics contains probing accounts of the work of such contemporary thinkers as Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Nozick, and Martha Nussbaum. In a final essay called "Imagining the Center," Harpham attacks the current academic obsession with marginality and challenges critics to occupy-imaginatively and theoretically - a position of political and intellectual power. Shadows of Ethics will interest literary critics, scholars in philosophy and postmodernism, and theorists interested in the relationship between ethics and their discipline.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

The Inertial Paradox: Thoughts Anterior to an Ethics of Literature

Ethics and Literary Study

Ethics and the Double Standard of Criticism

Derrida and the Ethics of Criticism

So ... What Is Englightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity

Of Rats and Men or, Reason in Our Time

Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Modernity

History and the Limits of Interpretation

Late Jameson

Chomsky and the Rest of Us

Once Again: Geoffrey Hartman on Culture

Philosophy Looking for Love

Conclusion: Imagining the Center

References

Index

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