Responsible responding: the ethics of a literary criticism of the Other
type: CreativeWork
description: Derek Attridgeâ€™s insight that, â€˜Coetzeeâ€™s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility towards the Other?â€™ (Attridge 2005: JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, xii), is conceptually rooted in Attridgeâ€™s tour de force on the theory of literary invention, The Singularity of Literature. In it he spins a complex, nuanced and powerful idea about the nature of literature as event in which the notion of otherness, or alterity, plays a primordial part in the advent of the literary. In this thesis, I develop a critique of the way in which a particular strand of literary criticism, which has blossomed in the field of Coetzee Studies, appropriates the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in its creation of an ethics-based, theme-reliant interpretive framework. While Derek Attridge, Mike Marais and Stefan Helgesson have each contributed greatly to this critical outlook, which I abbreviate as the â€˜Levinasian Approachâ€™, I choose to focus my research on the work produced by Attridge. My argument unfolds across two main sections. Section 1 contains a disquisition on pertinent aspects of Levinasâ€™s ethical philosophy to literary aesthetics (Chapter 1). Section 2 consists of two chapters where the first (Chapter 2) is a study of the interface of Levinasian ethics with Attridgeâ€™s theory of literature in the event. There, I begin with an exposition of Attridgeâ€™s theory of literature, exploring its conceptual bearing on Levinasâ€™s ethics. I make apparent the extent of his indebtedness to Levinasâ€™s ethics by closely examining how and where, in the gestation of his theory, he borrows from Levinasâ€™s ethical writings to develop a discourse on the nature of literature. This I follow up with a look at the nodes of divergence, unveiling the ways in which Attridge departs from Levinasian conceptions in his deployment of Levinasian terms. In conscripting the …
abstract: Derek Attridgeâ€™s insight that, â€˜Coetzeeâ€™s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility towards the Other?â€™ (Attridge 2005: JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, xii), is conceptually rooted in Attridgeâ€™s tour de force on the theory of literary invention, The Singularity of Literature. In it he spins a complex, nuanced and powerful idea about the nature of literature as event in which the notion of otherness, or alterity, plays a primordial part in the advent of the literary. In this thesis, I develop a critique of the way in which a particular strand of literary criticism, which has blossomed in the field of Coetzee Studies, appropriates the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in its creation of an ethics-based, theme-reliant interpretive framework. While Derek Attridge, Mike Marais and Stefan Helgesson have each contributed greatly to this critical outlook, which I abbreviate as the â€˜Levinasian Approachâ€™, I choose to focus my research on the work produced by Attridge. My argument unfolds across two main sections. Section 1 contains a disquisition on pertinent aspects of Levinasâ€™s ethical philosophy to literary aesthetics (Chapter 1). Section 2 consists of two chapters where the first (Chapter 2) is a study of the interface of Levinasian ethics with Attridgeâ€™s theory of literature in the event. There, I begin with an exposition of Attridgeâ€™s theory of literature, exploring its conceptual bearing on Levinasâ€™s ethics. I make apparent the extent of his indebtedness to Levinasâ€™s ethics by closely examining how and where, in the gestation of his theory, he borrows from Levinasâ€™s ethical writings to develop a discourse on the nature of literature. This I follow up with a look at the nodes of divergence, unveiling the ways in which Attridge departs from Levinasian conceptions in his deployment of Levinasian terms. In conscripting the …
author: Maserow, Joshua
language: eng
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:29Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of English Language and Literature

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13939