Abstract

The ethical criticism of literary narrative has been the target of serious detraction in the academy for at least the last three decades. Among the charges against ethical readings is that they can reduce a narrative's aesthetic dynamics into a monologic, dogmatic lesson that merely proselytizes an audience with an agenda. Narrative, however, is the literary genre most able to foreground the temporal contingencies of material existence, contingencies which forestall reductive, absolute ethical truth-claims. So while it is indeed possible to locate examples of reductive ethical criticism, it is also possible to theorize and practice ethical readings of literary narrative that avoid monologizing the moral component of their object. ;As ethical readings of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Albert Camus' The Plague, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot show, one non-reductive, non-monologic way to investigate the moral component of literary narrative is to make a text's pedagogic structures the focus of literary analysis. Two of these structures are voice and dialogue. The tension among competing pedagogic voices provides readers of literary narratives with an aesthetic paradigm for the production of historically contingent ethical truth-claims. Dialogue--between the voices of textual characters, between the text and its readers, and between literary critics--constitutes the structure whereby materially determined human beings develop their moral consciousnesses in the absence of absolute values. Acknowledging the historical contingency of their own labor, ethical readings of literary narrative also afford a locus for considering the way historical pressures impact the process of interpretation