Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society

Duke University Press (1999)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this volume Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues for a deeply original view of the relations among ethics, literary study, and critical theory. In thirteen lucid, provocative and often witty essays, Harpham rejects both the optimism of those who see ethics as a way of solving problems about values or principles and the pessimism of those who regard ethics as primarily a cover story for politics. Ethics, he claims, has been seen by its most powerful theorists as a discourse of “shadows,” a characteristic disturbance of thought in the presence of the other, a source of doubts rather than certainty. At the same time, however, ethics includes an element of violence, even blindness and “fundamentalism,” a crushing drive to clarity and resolution. Contemporary thinkers, Harpham argues, have been unwilling to accept this account of ethics and the obligations it would impose, and have, as a consequence, cultivated social and intellectual marginality as the only site of virtue, the only position in which critical intelligence is at home. They have, he contends, failed to “imagine the center,” to take up the true intellectual and worldly challenge of ethics. Tracking these issues and energies in debates about enlightenment, the politics of the aesthetic, the nature of rationality, and the worldly contexts of theory, Harpham demonstrates in compelling detail the ubiquity and true difficulty of ethics. _Shadows of Ethics_ also revives a neglected genre, the intellectual portrait, with extended meditations on Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, Fredric Jameson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Noam Chomsky. The book will interest literary critics, philosophers, cultural critics, and all those interested in the ethical character of intellectual work.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The ascetic imperative in culture and criticism.Geoffrey Galt Harpham - 1987 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Ascetic Imperative.Geoffrey Galt Harpham - 1990 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1):101-101.
On the Grotesque, Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature.Geoffrey Galt Harpham - 1985 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (4):412-413.
Symbolic Terror.Geoffrey Galt Harpham - 2002 - Critical Inquiry 28 (2):573-579.
Response to Slavoj Zizek.Geoffrey Galt Harpham - 2003 - Critical Inquiry 29 (3):504-507.
Renegotiating ethics in literature, philosophy, and theory.Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman & David Parker (eds.) - 1998 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Human society in ethics and politics.Bertrand Russell - 1955 - New York,: Simon & Schuster.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-10-17

Downloads
3 (#1,519,925)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references