Reading and Responding: Literature, Ethics and Citizenship

Reading and Responding: Literature, Ethics and Citizenship

Martha Nussbaum’s argument that literature cultivates 'powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship' centres on literature as a vehicle for empathy. Yet Suzanne Keen suggests 'a society that insists on receiving immediate ethical and political yields from the recreational reading of its citizens puts too great a burden on both empathy and the novel' (168). While Nussbaum and Keen offer differing positions on the social function of literature, both focus on its ethical function, suggesting reading should affect readers’ sense of responsibility to others in society. As Harpham describes, 'Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness - the moral law, the human other, cultural norms, the Good-in-itself etc. - are articulated and negotiated' (394). This paper will offer a reading of Mary Shelley as a Foucauldian founder of discourse. In doing so, it will argue that Shelley established a new way for readers to navigate ethical questions: Frankenstein results in the reader responding to 'the claims of otherness' precisely because Shelley does not provide them with a response - she leaves it to the reader to decide which ethical consideration takes primacy. She 'articulates' but allows the reader to 'negotiate'. It is this new discourse, most often articulated through the genre of science fiction which explores 'who we are and might be' (Nussbaum, 2323), that results only not in an empathetic response but in an ethical one. Literature, and particularly the unanswered ‘what if?’ of science fiction as established by Shelley, provides readers the space to engage with the ethical demands of their citizenry.

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