ABSTRACT
Recent criticism has underscored the difficulty of coming to terms with the ethical consequences of literary interpretation. On the one hand, criticism seems unable to avoid ethical judgments. Tobin Siebers (1988:1), recalling the etymological senses of the word criticism-“to cut” or “to distinguish”—argues that literary analysis is obliged to make critical choices that reveal a certain character or ethos: “literary criticism is inextricably linked to ethics.” On the other hand, to embrace a deliberately “ethical criticism” would seem to compromise the disinterestedness that, beginning with Kant, is often held up as a prerequisite for aesthetic judgment. An interest in certain moral values threatens to restrict the freedom that is required for unprejudiced rhetorical or formal analysis. Stephen Heath (1990:129), for example, writes of “a feeling that moral terms are an irrelevant weakening of analytic rigor.” Criticism, it would seem, can neither avoid ethics nor reconcile itself to the idea that it must promote a specific moral agenda.1
