ABSTRACT
An insistence on the subjective, psychological, or irreducibly human elements of ostensibly impersonal or objective theories informs much of contemporary scholarship in the humanities. Yet at the same time a key dimension of subjectivity in the tradition of ethics and in the practical criticism of many literary genres—character or ethos—has suffered a kind of exile from theoretical work in the field of literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the theoretical terms of art used to denote subjective experience in contemporary literary and cultural studies—identity, hybridity, performativity, disidentification, embodiment—simply fail to capture key features of character and ethos. To be sure, characterological terms appear with a kind of regularity across many debates in theory; at the least, they form part of the adjectival and adverbial arsenal that enlivens any richly descriptive analytical critique. We have become accustomed to hearing pragmatists called smug, or rationalists depicted as defensive and uptight. The hermeneut of suspicion is paranoid; the p.c. brigade oppressively pious. But in part because of established disciplinary protocols, such ascriptions often seem not to be an integral part of the formal argument; indeed, it typically remains unclear, when they appear, whether they are gratuitous or crucially significant, descriptive flourish or evaluative death blow. On the one hand, as terms of critique, such statements seem to dismiss without examining, to imply deficient psychology rather than misguided argument. On the other hand, such judgments are assumed to matter, to need saying, to carry some vital explanatory force. And indeed, appeals to character appear not only at moments of negative judgment; theorists sometimes feel impelled to flesh out their accounts through appeal to characterological enactment. What the critic of pragmatism sees as 104smugness, for example, the practitioner occasionally elaborates as an admirable characterological achievement. In the case of Richard Rorty's “ironist” or Barbara Herrnstein Smith's “postmodern skeptic,” in fact, a properly casual and unbothered relation to the post-foundational world is offered up precisely as exemplary character. 1
