ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between literature and the ethical demands to which it responds? For Timothy Bewes, the answer to this question is shame. Van Bever Donker’s chapter explores his understanding of shame and its relationship to the questions of justice and ethics in literature, dislodging, through a discussion of Derrida and Lévinas among others, his positioning of shame as the figure of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in literature. In so doing, it opens up a more productive and nuanced approach to the ethical space of literature – namely, recognition – which is illustrated through indicating a rather different reading of Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River than to what Bewes unfolds in his book.
