ABSTRACT
Speaking to Little Bilham about Chad New som e's surprising development, Strether describes his own viewpoint and his interest:
The speech of literary theory, especially in recent years, has not often shared Strether's concerns and connections. I believe that it has an impoverished future without them. I imagine, instead, a future in which our talk about literature will return, increasingly, to a concern with the practical-to the ethical and social questions that give literature its high importance in our lives. A future in which these interests, like Strether's here, will find themselves connected to an interest in Mme. de Vionnet-in, that is, those emotions and desires that do not reside harmoniously within the domain of ethical judgment. In which a literary-philosophical inquiry, with something like Strether's "candour of fancy" (30) and his "conscientious wonder" (28), will ask what literary works express about these matters-express in virtue of their "content," but also, and inseparably, in virtue of their forms and structures, their ways of describing: since those ways are "at all times" (as Strether "philosophized") "the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought" (202). In short: a future in which literary theory (while not forgetting its many other pursuits) will also join with ethical theory in pursuit of the question, "How should one live?"
