Ethics and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Studies

This volume assembles a selection of papers delivered at a conference held at Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus, in May 2000. The conference set out to examine the way in which literary or cultural texts can illuminate the thorny relation between ethics and subjectivity. The essays offer no homogeneous stance but explore a wide range of theoretical and experiential perspectives. Strongly held views include the contention that the infinitude of pure consciousness provides a groundless foundation for spontaneous right action as an alternative to systems of ethics, and that within the posthuman, in which the subject becomes increasingly a material product, such nonmaterial qualities as ethics itself will be compromised. Also discussed are the status of the postmodern university in relation to global culture, the sanitizing of globalization by postmodern and postcolonial culture, and the place for an ethics of care in relation to patriarchal culture in the context of western and third world feminism. The relations between self or subjectivity and the Other receive extensive analysis in the context of Celan’s poetry, depth psychology, 17th-century debate, and the work of Levinas, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and others. The essays included here are not purely theoretical, as exemplified by the last two, which derive some of their arguments from intense personal experience.