On American Ethical Criticism

This dissertation combs through the history of American ethical criticism diachronically and analyzes the main concepts of different ethical critics synchronically, and then draws following conclusions:American ethical criticism can be traced back to the argument of ancient Greece over the relationship between literature and ethics and takes moral criticism as its main form in the early period. Before 1980s, American ethical criticism witnesses the flourishing of the studies on ethics of literature and its falling because of the booming of Aestheticism and its flaws. With the ethical turn refreshing in studies of literature and philosophy American ethical criticism comes into renaissance and develops into two schools, namely new humanism ethical criticism and deconstructionism ethical criticism. In the early 21st century the ethical literary criticism, put forward by Chinese scholars, brings further perfection to American ethical criticism in theoretical foundations and critical approaches.This dissertation consists of six parts. In the part of introduction it explores its necessity and possibility on the basis of a detailed review on researches of ethical criticism at home and abroad. The study on the history of American ethical criticism is necessary to prove that the renaissance of ethical criticism in the 1980s is not a return back to the traditional criticism, but a rebirth from the old one. The possibility lies in the close relation between literature and ethics as well as the practices of moral criticism.Chapter one displays the rising and falling of ethical criticism before the 1980s. It claims that the flourishing of moral criticism help to thrive the studies on ethics of literature. Its falling results from the prevailing of aestheticism, the research focus on author moving to on texts and readers’ reception, the research approach turning from epistemology to linguistics, and its innate flaws that an excessively ethical reading of literature is apt to potential moral censorship, and that it can not help to solve the disillusionment with the traditional moral values and withstand this or that brand of new literary critical approach.Chapter two generalizes the reasons and characteristics of ethical turn in literary researches of 1980s, discusses the main ideas of three critics who made important contribution to the renaissance of ethical criticism, and analyzes the main figures of new humanism ethical criticism and deconstructionism ethical criticism from aspects of theoretical foundations, main concepts, and critical practices. This chapter points out:Basing his theory on the thoughts of Aristotle, humanism and new humanism, Wayne Booth coins a new word, "coduction, "to interpret the shift from monism to pluralism and the idea that books are friends and relocates the essence of ethical criticism. Deriving her main ideas from Aristotelian ethics, the Stoics, and moral sentiment theories of the eighteenth century, Martha Nussbaum advocates plural and noncommensurable values and emphasizes the importance of perception and emotions in ethical criticism. Absorbing nutrition from Kant’s ethics and Paul De Man’s language theory, Hillis Miller proposes that there is a necessary ethical moment in the act of reading which is the referential turn of drawing ethical conclusions and making ethical judgments and prescriptions. There are three key elements of his ethical criticism, i.e. language theory, narrative theory, and a theory of personification. With his reliance on Bakhtin, Levinas, Cavell, Robert Langbaum, and Wayne Booth, Adam Zachary Newton derives his narrational, representational, and hermeneutic levels from Genette’s triadic model, presents that narrative is ethics, and proposes a transactive theory of reading where texts shape readers, and readers shape texts.Chapter three summarizes the traditional opposites of ethical criticism:The autonomism argument concludes that art and ethics are autonomous realms of value and thus, criteria from the ethical realm should not be imported to evaluate the aesthetic realm. Cognitive triviality points out that, in general, the moral theses associated with artworks are usually in the nature of truisms, thus hardly counts as a moral discovery, so the cognitive accomplishments of literature are paltry. The anti-consequentialist opposes the way that ethical critics evaluate literary works according to their ethically relevant behavioral effects on society. Then it displays the responses of ethical critics to those arguments and analyses the debate between Richard Posner, Booth, and Nussbaum.Chapter four makes a brief review on the reception of American ethical criticism in China, and then explores its reconstruction and perfection. The dissertation believes that the ethical literary criticism, initiated by Chinese scholars, perfects American ethical criticism in theory by proving that literature grows out of the ethical demand and the ethical fuction is primary while aesthetic fuction is secondary while in practice by defining a set of new critical terms and their application.In the part of conclusion this dissertation offers the following proposals for the further perfection of ethical criticism:specifying the distinction between the conception of ethic and moral; dealing with the relationship between the finiteness of ethical criticism and the infiniteness of literary interpretation; enriching ethical critical terms and their implication; perfecting ethical criticism systematically by setting up more ethical critical paradigms and absorbing the advantages of other critical approaches from a interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective.