As an aspect of textual and critical strategies and as a target of modernist critique, the discourse of ethics figures as a deep anxiety in the diverse projects of literary modernism. While the recent "ethical turn" in criticism has reasserted 'readerly' commitments to characterization, history, and humanist values, the modernist project of an ethics that obtains in the reading of 'writerly' texts - a postulate crucial to a variety of difficult modernist works and their claim that difficulty is valuable - remains undeveloped precisely because it brings the very structure of commitment into question. Can modernist reading and the ethical ever coincide if modernism endlessly produces ambivalence? Can a commitment to difficulty resist a "moralistic turn" in reading?
Abstract and cv by March 20 to:
Kriss Basil
kbasil@fas.harvard.edu
or Nick LoLordo
lolordo@fas.harvard.edu