Volume 129, Issue 1-2

It does not go without saying that literature should be read or taught in universities in these bad days. Worldwide, we are experiencing many challenging problems and transformations – climate change, global financial meltdown, the defunding of universities, the dominance of new digital media, a big shift from literary study to cultural studies. Reading literature hardly seems likely to help confront these problems. Two positive answers to the question in the title can nevertheless be given: 1) Reading literature, for those who like to do it, is an end in itself, a good in itself. 2) Literature may possibly teach its readers how to resist the lies and distortions with which we are inundated in the media and in politicians' speeches these days.

In Le Roman dialogué après 1950: poétique de l'hybridité (Boblet, Honoré Champion, 2003), Marie-Hélène Boblet claims that the dialogue novel emerged as an aesthetic response to the Second World War, attempting to address the ethical concerns of a Europe in ruins by heralding a new humanism based on and guaranteed by dialogue itself. Dialogue has a fundamentally ethical structure of discursive co-operation between self and other issuing in a mutually constructed ‘we’. Boblet asserts that the dialogue novel avails itself of this structure. Yet few, if any, dialogue novels can be said to fulfil the promise that Boblet associates with them. Situated at one remove from philosophy while still heavily marked by it, the dialogue novel rather constitutes a Derridean non-lieu that encourages us to problematise the ethico-philosophical expectations that have accumulated around the concept of dialogue, expectations that have proved eminently transferable to literary theory and criticism. Set precisely in the aftermath of the war, Henry Green's dialogue novels are a case in point. Green insists on including or reinserting the dysfunctions of dialogue within dialogue itself, thus calling into question any ‘ideal purity’ to the concept of dialogue (as Derrida does). As the characters in Green's Nothing struggle with problems of meaning and saying, so they come to realise that dialogue does not necessarily guarantee mutual understanding nor the full disclosure of meaning: the other will always remain, in Derrida's words, tout autre . Nothing opens up the possibility of another species both of dialogue and ethics, both involving conditions of undecidability. Since dialogue cannot function as an ethical framework that reduces the unknown and saves us from undecidability, ethical decisions must be made in the absence of complete knowledge. The suspension involved in the moment of undecidability leaves speakers open to the speech of the other; yet, in responding to this call, they must sacrifice answering the calls of all those ‘other others’ to whom they are bound in the same general relation of responsibility. Like decision and responsibility, dialogue turns out to be ethically both problematic and paradoxical: it ensures ethics only by risking the sacrifice of ethics. Green's characters may accuse each other of turning molehills into mountains, but in Nothing , every molehill is always already a Mount Moriah. Here dialogue supports Derrida's claim that the sacrifice of Isaac marks even “the most common and everyday experience of responsibility”.

The essay reads T.W. Adorno's “Theses on Art and Religion Today”, first published in English in 1945, as a way of beginning to consider Adorno's ideas that the history of art is one of irreversible change; and that art can no longer successfully address religious topics. It investigates these opinions by examining the verse-disposition of a poem by the English poet J.H. Prynne, “Thoughts On The Esterházy Court Uniform”. To find out what conclusion the essay comes to, please read it.

In recent literary studies, the ethical dimension of literature seems to have gained ground over predominantly formalist or aesthetic(ist) conceptualizations of the literary text. The argument of the present essay is that the so-called ethical turn is in fact, historically speaking, an ‘ethical re-turn’ in that it questions ideas of aesthetic autonomy that were only made possible by the ‘aesthetic turn’ in Western literature brought about by Romanticism. This aesthetic turn was chiefly responsible for the bifurcation of ethics and aesthetics which constitutes all modern pretensions to the autonomy of art. In order to put the current debate into perspective, the present essay revisits the undisputed common-sense union of ethics and aesthetics in the early eighteenth century, as conceptualised in the writings of the third earl of Shaftesbury and Alexander Pope. Under the pressure of Enlightenment innovations of thought, Shaftesbury and Pope felt the need to proclaim what was still obvious to them: the inseparable identity of a common sense for morals and taste in human perception (Shaftesbury) as well as in the judgment of “good” literature (Pope). Even though the belief in such a uniform aesthetic-cum-moral ‘common sense’ might seem dated and alien to the critical debate of our own time, aesthetic judgment in the act of reading can never completely divorce itself from ethical concerns.

This article purports to demonstrate that romance is characterised by a natural affinity with the expression of an ethics of alterity on account of its reliance on the presentation of paroxystic affect. It engages with a series of texts belonging to the canon of contemporary fiction and uses critical and theoretical material concerning romance as mode and the Levinasian ethics of alterity. By successively analysing romance as the privileged locus of the presentation of the other, as the site where the openness of the present is performed and which allows for the disarticulating power of the event, the article argues in favour of the status of romance as operator of exteriority.

The article places Age of Iron in the post-Beckettian trend that Andrew Gibson calls “vestigial modernism”, characterised by the attempt to give substance to the concept of an intermittent world, based on the philosophical notions of event and remainder. The article argues that Mrs. Curren's writing/narrating of the letter to her absent daughter constitutes a rare event in Jean Badiou's sense of the term, capable of putting an end to the stagnation and inertia of the remainder of apartheid, and that her struggle to make sense of her life and times involves the abandonment of her self-centred ideas and values for that sense of ethical responsibility for the Other that Emmanuel Levinas sees as the ontological function of woman/ the feminine, as opposed to the egoism, “which is not a bad failing of the subject but its ontology”.

Das Paradigma der Ethik in der Literaturwissenschaft stellt keine Rückkehr zu inhaltlichen oder gar dogmatischen Fixierungen dar, vielmehr ist eine spezifisch literarische Ethik, jenseits der philosophischen Disziplin, als eine Reflexionstheorie von Moral zu beschreiben. Diese nicht-normative, sondern deskriptive Form der Ethik lässt sich besonders an der Frage erkenntnistheoretischer Grenzfälle entfalten, so auch im Umgang mit dem Phänomen der Dummheit. Neben theologischen und philosophischen Mustern kommen spezifisch literarische Strategien zur Sprache, eine aufklärerische Entlarvung der (kollektiven) Dummheit und eine selbstkritische Wahrnehmung individueller “Fehlergrenzen”.