Ethics, autobiography and the will

Stephen Spender's World within world

Richard Freadman

pp. 17-37

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

During the period of what has come to be known as Contemporary Literary Theory ethical criticism of what I would call a substantive kind has had to struggle for survival. By substantive I mean the kind that proceeds on the assumption that ethics is a quasi-autonomous discipline possessing its own conceptual and applied challenges, a conceptual vocabulary, a "thick"¹ sense of how moral beings function or might function in social environments, and a belief in the centrality of ethical discourse to all forms of social description. This isn't of course to say that many of the political strains of recent Theory and criticism — feminism, cultural materialism, postcolonial discourses — aren't fundamentally ethical projects. Rather that postmodern theory and criticism have tended to adopt either a taken-for-granted attitude to the ethical which says that it will take care of itself if we demolish existing structures of power, or a hostile posture which reposes in the belief that "traditional" ethical discourses and attitudes are complicit with, and have served to prop up, those structures of power. On this view ethics so conceived must also be demolished, deconstructed.²

Cited authors

Spender Stephen