A Literary Aesthetics of War Crime

In order to develop a literary aesthetics of war crime, I examine the phenomenon of moral immunity in military memoir. Using three paradigmatic examples of memoirs of unjust wars characterised by the routine perpetration of war crimes, I argue that moral immunity is achieved by means of three literary devices: literary irresponsibility, ethical peerage, and moral economy. I then employ the proposed literary aesthetics of war crime to provide an answer to the perennial question of the relationship between literature and morality as well as to two specific instantiations of this question, the value interaction debate in literary aesthetics and the ethics of reading in literary theory. My conclusion is that the literary aesthetics of war crime demonstrates both that there is a systematic relationship between aesthetic value and moral value and that there is no systematic relationship between literary ambiguity and moral uncertainty.

Inceptions

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that non-coincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the non-trivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way does the fact that they must render our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Most explicitly for James, for whom revision, a striving to keep the work perpetually at the border of its emergence, was a fundamentally ethical practice, attention to inception is a commitment to human freedom; a similar commitment is legible in all the writers examined here. To experience this vibrancy, the sense that the work might have been, might still yet be, otherwise, it suffices, James reminds us, to reread it. Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, that follows from perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

Being Taught Something World-Sized

This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.