Shadows of Ethics

What place do ethical concerns have in intellectual life today? Why do ethical issues so often intrude in discussions of literature, criticism, and culture? And why are ethical issues so often unresolved? In short, why does ethics seem to be both urgent and problematic? In this book, the noted critic Geoffrey Galt Harpham seeks to transform the contemporary understanding of ethics by arguing that it not only "shadows" other discourses but is itself "shadowed." For Harpham, ethics is not a source of rules or norms, but a way of structuring questions. A conflicted discourse, ethics marks the point where literature becomes conceptually rigorous and theory becomes humanised. In addition to deeply original meditations on such subjects as rationality, aesthetics, and "enlightenment," Shadows of Ethics contains probing accounts of the work of such contemporary thinkers as Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Nozick, and Martha Nussbaum. In a final essay called "Imagining the Center," Harpham attacks the current academic obsession with marginality and challenges critics to occupy-imaginatively and theoretically - a position of political and intellectual power. Shadows of Ethics will interest literary critics, scholars in philosophy and postmodernism, and theorists interested in the relationship between ethics and their discipline.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is Professor of English at Tulane University.