Narrative Ethics

The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly negotiated by literary studies. This text, winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize, makes a case for understanding narrative as ethics. Assuming an intrinsic and necessary connection between the two, Newton explores the ethical consequences of telling stories and fictionalizing character, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness and reader in the process. He treats these relations as defining properties of prose fiction, of particular import in 19th- and 20th-century texts. Newton's readings cover a wide range of authors and periods, including Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. A work of theory as well as a critical performance, "Narrative Ethics" also stakes a claim for itself as moral inquiry.
To that end, Newton links the ethical-philosophical projects of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Cavell and Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of chorus for his textual analyses - a bridge between philosophy's ear and literary criticism's voice. His work should be relevant to scholars and students of English and American literature, as well as specialists in narrative and literary theory, hermeneutics and contemporary philosophy.