| This doctoral dissertation, Pushing Limits of Language: Ethics and American Literature, focuses on the way 19th-century (and some 20th century-) American literature relates itself to ethics. I define the term 'ethics'---using The Hebrew Bible, essays from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as 19th- and 20 th-century German philosophy and criticism---to mean a system of beliefs and action, wherein one becomes responsible for one's beliefs by choosing or naming them and then acting on them. But ethics, in this sense, is only possible under the condition that one is free to choose one's own beliefs. This paradoxical model---choosing and articulating in common language the beliefs that are particular to the self---implies that ethics may only be possible at the limit of language, in the space between cliche and chaotic meaninglessness.;According to this model, my work closely examines the ways the following American texts address themselves to ethics, and issues of language, subjectivity and autonomy: Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Leaves of Grass, Nature, Emily Dickinson's verse, as well as stories and novels by Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Literature, I suggest, though not necessarily 'ethical' itself, is related to ethics, and therefore to issues of subjectivity and autonomy, because it reiterates freedom of choice by continuously expanding the realm of the imagined and imaginable in language. Given the two major ideals on which this country stands---'freedom' and 'democracy'---the relationship between ethics and literature becomes particularly significant when we examine American literature.;But such a relationship takes on a broader significance when we examine American literature written in the mid-19th century. At this point, when this nation's literature is taking on its own characteristics, the country is heading toward civil war. The extent to which American literature serves ethics by reiterating freedom, choice and possibility is especially complicated at this point in history, when citizens and lawmakers are actually debating the question of who should or should not be considered a 'person.' Much of the 20th-century American literature I examine also demonstrates that these issues had not vanished with the previous century. |
