Writing out of death: Literature, ethics, and the beyond of language

The present dissertation reads three works of early American fiction—Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), Washington Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860)—as they bring the resources of literary writing to bear on the fundamental difficulties of thinking about ethics. Thus, for instance, in the strangely contagious tale of Sleepy Hollow and in the nightly rhythms of its uncanny horseman, this dissertation finds the force of an enigmatic ethical imperative: an obligation to bear witness to an event, but also the confounding impossibility of determining the precise nature of that event. Something analogous is at work in the other two texts as well: out of an overwhelming encounter with death, where being and subjectivity themselves come under question, one finds not only a certain impasse of expression and understanding, but also a powerful ethical obligation to speak and to tell a tale. In the desperate struggle to put the mysterious event properly into language, what is opened up aesthetically, this dissertation argues, is an ethical space where human nature can come into its own.; To further develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, the present dissertation also reads three twentieth century continental thinkers, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas, who in psychoanalysis and philosophy renewed the effort to think about a non-cognitive dimension to ethics and who likewise proposed aesthetics as a way of approaching that dimension. Through these theoretical readings, this dissertation shows that, as a mode of expression that draws its power from a certain relation to the incomprehensible, the unknown, or the unconscious, literature is able to communicate that part of ethics which has resisted more traditional philosophy. Thus, the aim of the present work, as a comparatist reading of American literature, is to bring nineteenth-century American literature into contact with recent continental developments in aesthetics. By situating early American texts as participants within a larger discourse about art and ethics, this work thereby broadens the possibilities for understanding these texts beyond their present historicist confines—though without, it should be said, denying the importance of history.