| Ethics, as both practical reality, and theoretic discourse, has received at best peripheral attention in literary studies since the advent of formalist criticisms. However, in the wake of deconstruction and of various kinds of cultural criticism, what a recent issue of Yale French Studies terms "the ethical question" has acquired a new respectability, as recent work by Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Charles Altieri, Paul Ricoeur and others attests. My dissertation adds to this work by redressing what I take to be significant ommissions in the field of narrative theory. Narratology has yet to account, adequately or fully, for the ethical in narrative as either a formal property (on the order of fictional patterns and structures) or constitutive force (binding relations among tellers, listeners, and witnesses.);In contrasting a certain claim of acknowledgment, in Stanley Cavell's sense, which narrative relationships often exact to a traditionally moralized reading of the poem's narrative "point," I distinguish the role I assign to ethics in my study from the one it has traditionally assumed in literary criticism. I amplify that distinction through a particular vocabulary of terms and concepts borrowed from the philosophical work of Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, and Mikhail Bakhtin, which articulate a common boundary between philosophy and literary theory, and which I argue are central to a full understanding of narrative form.;The textual analyses proceed along three distinct but conjoint lines of inquiry. The first, narratorial, refers to the narrative act itself, the dialogic system of exchanges at work between persons when they assume the mantle of narrators and interlocutors. The second tracks an ethics of representation, what I argue is an often complex and risky dialectic between person and literary character; it entails the deliberate, unwarranted, or often uncanny effects that take place when selves become narrated or characterized. Throughout, I draw a link between character and narration by focussing on the vicissitudes of each--acts of storytelling as acts of seizure, of generosity, of entreaty, on the one hand, acts of characterization as amplifications of deformations of personality, on the other. Their interplay, I suggest, is further complicated by specifically interpretive problems, for instance, the stakes riding on the kind of hermeneutic stance one takes in response to, or in reception of, a told story; such problems are often modeled within the text itself, and comprise the third and last of my three categories, the hermeneutic.;The texts I study comprise a range of 19th and 20th century British and American fiction from Dickens' Bleak House and Melville's Benito Cereno to Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes and Richard Wright's Native Son. |
