Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters

Introduction Change name and it's about you, that Thus in his Satires (I.1. 69-70) Horace elegantly and succinctly defines imaginative transposing by which readers identify with fictions. Telling and consuming stories is a fundamental and universal human activity. From time we are born sound of story accompanies us like collective heart beat of humanity, and none of us rejects opportunity to enlarge ourselves by trying lives and feelings of fictional characters. We may not all consume a steady diet of what college catalogues sometimes call books, but our interactions with stories in one form or another - in commercials, TV programs, movies, song lyrics, sermons, legends, fairy tales, novels, dramas, and so on - is constant and ongoing. The famous command in opening line of Moby Dick, Call me Ishmael, is an invitation to reader not only to identify a character, but to identify with a character: Imagine your name to be Ishmael and it will be about you, this story. You will learn to see world through my eyes, to feel world through my nerve endings. During time we spend together you will learn to live as if my heart beat in your chest, as if your ears answered to my name. Transpositions between readers and fictional characters carry obvious significance. Despite current theories in philosophy and criticism about inescapability of relativism, most of us cannot evade deep intuition that identifying with characters in stories can exert a powerful influence on quality and content of our own lives. It is this perspective - stories as an influence on ethos, or who we become - that makes criticism necessary. To analyze how fictions exert this influence and to assess its effects is criticism's job. What humanities in general need is an criticism that is intellectually defensible, not to replace or displace other critical approaches but to complement them. What literary criticism needs in particular is a theoretical basis for inquiries into and judgments about potential effects of and narrative in general.(1) We need this theoretical grounding because practical criticism goes on all time, often conducted in a most helter-skelter, contradictory, and intellectually incoherent way. A firmer theoretical grounding could help us do practical criticism more thoughtfully and responsibly. Both within academy and within society as a whole, someone is always claiming that a given novel, movie, or TV program is either uplifting or degrading, inspiring or demeaning, should be read and seen by everyone or shouldn't disgrace either video airwaves or shelves of public library. Every time a feminist exposes Hemingway's complicity with patriarchy, or every time an African-American critic recommends retrieval of slave narratives because such narratives shame our past and help us shape future, and every time a Judith Fetterley, a Terry Eagleton, or a Michel Foucault decries dehumanizing effects of master narratives on subject-readers, such critics are deeply engaged in important versions of criticism that are not at all diminished in robustness for being disguised as any kind of discourse but The truth of my claim that criticism goes on constantly in academy is not obvious. What is obvious is that for last 100 years - from time of art for art's sake movement to present - most literary critics have strongly objected to ethical as an adjective for either literature or criticism. Inside academy, criticism seems immediately to conjure images of Plato packing poets out of his republic, or memory of Matthew Arnold talking about the best that has been thought and said, or mental image of F. R. Leavis intoning on and on about the great tradition. …