Ethics and Agency: The Limits and Necessity of Ethical Criticism

Abstract

The recent return of ethical considerations to the theory of literature is a challenge to poststructural and aestheticist theory, with a main frontline running along the boundaries of the text. While deconstruction and rhetorical analysis claim that there is no outside of text, ethical criticism is an endeavour to breach these boundaries and to establish a connection between the text and the real world of flesh-and-blood authors and readers. This chapter wants to show how these seemingly incommensurate positions highlight not only some of the shortcomings of both theories, but also point towards a way in which they can productively interact. One of the limitations of ethical criticism throughout the ages (from Jeremy Collier to Frederic Wertham and all the way to Gardner and Booth) is that they claim ethical relevance for the real reader (stepping outside of textuality) while not allowing that reader to become a moral agent that actively and consciously engages textuality. Nowhere does this discrepancy become more apparent than in the discussion of video games, which is used as the main example. The moral agency of a reader/player does not lie in the act she reads about/commits, but in her conscious acceptance of entering into the game of fictionality. It is their very desire to connect text to world and free it from the grasp of poststructural relativism that makes ethical critics forget the core function of fictionality: to offer alternative versions of the world that are relative and self-contained because they are recognized as fictional. In reading stories as much as in playing narrative games, there is a consciousness of fictionality, of being inside something that is distinct from life and contingent. It is this consciousness that is ethically relevant, and that is both deconstruction’s contribution to ethical criticism and vice versa.