Recognition and Ethics in World Literature
Recognition and Ethics in World Literature is a critical comparative study of contemporary world literature, focusing on the importance of the ethical turn (or return) in literary theory. The book examines the ethical engagement of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, exploring the overlap and divergence between Levinasian/Derridean and Aristotelian ethics. Recognitions and emotional responses are integral to the unfolding of ethical concerns, and the ethics they explore are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic. Recognition is particularly suitable for the concerns of world literature authors in its interconnection of the universal and the particular—a binary that has been crucial in postcolonialism and remains important for the wider field of world literature. This study builds its analysis around three broad themes: religion, the memory of violence, and the human.
From New National to World Literature
From New National to World English Literature offers a personal perspective on the evolution of a major cultural movement that began with decolonization, continued with the assertion of African, West Indian, Commonwealth, and other literatures, and has evolved through postcolonial to world or international English literature. Bruce King, one of the pioneers in the study of the new national literatures and still an active literary critic, discusses the personalities, writers, issues, and contexts of what he considers the most important change in culture since modernism. In this selection of forty-five essays and reviews, King discusses issues such as the emergence and aesthetics of African literature, the question of the existence of a “Nigerian literature”, the place of the new universities in decolonizing culture, the contrasting models of American and Irish literatures, and the changing nature of exile and diasporas. He emphasizes themes such as traditionalism versus modernism, the dangers of cultural assertion, and the relationships between nationalism and internationalism. Special attention is given to Nigerian, West Indian, Australian, Indian, and Pakistani literature.
Ethics and Poetics
Bringing together international scholars interested in the ethics of fiction, this book extends the rich field of ethical literary criticism that has emerged in the last twenty years. New ground is broached in that the authors explore literariness itself as constitutive of ethical intimations about the pluralistic community and about egalitarian modes of communication. The epistemological point of departure is the ethical thought of modernity as filtered through Hegelian recognition as infinite social responsibility. The structure of the anthology reflects this anchoring as the authors investigate modalities of recognition and social regeneration via literary language, which effects the transvaluation of values, of the collective imaginary, and of intermediality. This collection is generally concerned with the immanence of intersubjectivity in literature and with how from this immanence new modes of ethical communication are generated. The authors of Ethics and Poetics clarify how modern narratives, in ways akin to, yet different from, political interrogations such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism and gender studies, refine the understanding of the recursive process of recognition, thereby disclosing ethico-political dimensions of the reading experience. The chapters in this anthology share an interest in ethico-literary responses to shifts within modernity from communal to transnational imagination. All the articles explore how modalities of recognition in modern and contemporary literature deeply affect and potentially regenerate real social spaces.
Hegel's Ethics of Recognition
In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition (Anerkennung). Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit (Geist) as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his Philosophy of Right, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age.
Human Rights and Narrated Lives
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.
