Introduction: Remembering ethics

Ethics, like history, is once again in order. In his introduction to a recent special topic issue of PMLA, " Ethics and Literary Study " (to identify just one site), Lawrence Buell suggests that " Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies during the past dozen years, even if it has not at least yet become the paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for the 1970s and historic ism for the 1980s." 1 But assertions such as Buell ' s about the recent emergence o f ethics as a critical and interpretive category for literary study do not serve only to mark an important movement (perhaps a shift) i n new critical work; they also serve to situate an urgent and important question: Is this emergence of ethics in effect some thin gnew, or is it, rather, something more like a re-emergence? Is the turn to ethics (or history) in fact a return? Buell writes, Perhaps a certain desultoriness is to be expected of an emerging discourse, or congeries of discourses, struggling with self-definition. A matter of more open dispute is whether the ethical turn, to the extent that it offers something substantively new, is an advance or a retrogression. (Buell 11) This return both to and of ethics-neither wholly new nor wholly old bears more than a metaphorical resemblance to memory. For it is the memory of any given event, let us say, or experience-that returns to us as neither completely new nor completely old: theremembered thing is clearly both. It is new in that it fully occupies the present moment; it is present to us when and as we remember. At the same time, the remembered thing is old, familiar to us as some residual piece o f a past that is itself no longer present to us. It is this dynamic of memory occupying both the present and the past that figures the idea of ethics proposed in this volume: Ethics is that which comes back to us in the model of remembering.