Shadows of ethics : criticism and the just society / Geoffrey Galt Harpham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics, Modern.

Criticism.

Physical Description:

xiv, 282 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 1999.

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 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. Ethics, he argues, involves the stresses and conflicts that arise in confrontation with an "other" -- a human other, but also an otherness within ethics itself. A conflicted discourse, ethics marks the point where literature becomes conceptually rigorous and theory becomes humanized. 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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [265]-276) and index.

ISBN:

0822323001

0822323206

OCLC:

40575450