Nick Harris

Blog June 21, 2024

The Turn to Ethics and Affect

            The critical reader observes how in my previous post “Immediacy Put into Practice” on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or at least one chapter of it, can easily be compared to close reading of text and how such close reading reflects the text as a whole. Such parsing, if we can call the process by that name, is common in poetry reading, but in larger prosaic works proves problematic simply because of how to choose which portion of the text the critic will examine. Usually, an early chapter will set a tone that the rest of the book will follow, but not necessarily. Followers of the history of Postmodernism may immediately go to the idea of “deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida’s examination of extreme close reading as a determinant of the ideas behind the text. Though influential at the time of the decade of the 1980s, deconstruction has reached a certain limit due to the nature of such close reading’s questionable end results as relative to the theme of the work. Deconstruction reaches into topics beyond literary theory such as fine arts and hard science, and in these areas, the relevancy of close reading can often come out as comical. One can write about “The Tao of Physics” for decades and still have the splitting of the atom into quarks to deal with on a practical level, or at least the search for the reality behind such quantum physics, a reality that threatens to destroy the planet at any given moment (see the example of Christopher Norris, 1998).. So, the critic today wants to turn to other historical progressions from Barthes and Sontag’s pop culture immediacy in order to ascertain their relevance beyond the close reading of literary texts. One such development also occurred in the decade of he 1980s and from a questionable progression of ideas, those of ethics and literature.

            According to Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep, the search for ethics in literature before the 1980’s had the name “the affective fallacy” and was generally discredited in the literary theory community (p.4). Since the 1990’s a “turn” has occurred which takes the basic ideas of ethics and literature out of “fallacy” mode, making not only a “turn to ethics” possible, but also, eventually, a turn to the psychological goodness of “affect” in literature as a means towards individual happiness and therefore an added relevance to the entire reading process.

But Booth points out the questionable origins of this turn to ethics as a means toward manipulation of educational texts. Booth writes:

                        The concern for an ethical criticism of texts arose in the 1980s

in part due to several objections to the readings of American texts from

the nineteenth century which used words and phrases of a racial pejorative

character. Chief among these is the use of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel

Clemens, which had been a popular text for collegiate use for over a

century.

Such concerns led to other ethical boundaries which various organizations claimed needed to be kept in check, often resulting in what amounted to book banning in schools by both conservative forces and progressive forces wishing to change societal attitudes toward the disenfranchised. Booth’s conclusion: “Anyone who attempts to invite ethical criticism back into the front parlor, to join more fashionable, less threatening varieties, must know from the beginning that no simple, definitive conclusions lie ahead” (pp 4-5). No simple conclusions are a truth that has haunted readers before these concerns and afterwards.

            Critics had to take a look at the issue from the perspective of classical philosophy to step the literary criticism toward a more positive direction. The work of philosophers such as Marth C. Nussbaum and Rochard Rorty has advanced the concern of ethics and literature into a more positive realm. We base this positivity mostly on Aristotlean concerns for how art has an effect upon the individual. Selections from Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions from 2001 show this turn to the formation of individual morality as an important aspect of critical reading. From the “Introduction,” Nussbaum writes, “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by a detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning” (1). Nussbaum’s insistence on compassion as an element of reading brings the critic closer to embracing the idea of “affect” – an embracement which before this turn to ethics had been derided, possibly because of a Platonian, logical viewpoint that critics had held in perpetuity.

            About this progression of ideas from the counterculture insistence on immediacy, critics can now see beyond the further limitations of deconstruction as we delve into the ethereality of an Aristotlean doctrine of “Ethos.” Other critics can hold with deconstruction. Still others keep the modernist insistence on structuralism alive, and, indeed, the equation  of structure with deconstruction is easily observed even if the words might be antonymic in nature. But in terms of the spirit of the counterculture, that the critic, the reader, needs to have a freedom to develop ideas as they are presented on a moment-to-moment basis, we can now turn to ethics and affect in our search for how to show the continued relevancy of reading in an increasingly dehumanized world.

 

References

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep. University of California Press,1988.

Norris, Christopher. "On the Limits of "Undecidability": Quantum Physics, Deconstruction, and Anti-realism." The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 11 no. 2, 1998, p. 407-432. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/yale.1998.a36808.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Introduction.” in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1-14.

 

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