Reconsidering the Ethics of Reading

For many defenders of Western liberal education, literature has always been an indicator and instrument of civilization, a correctional officer of the “rest” as it were. In fact, Martha Nussbaum famously asserts, literature “cultivates our humanity” and teaches us the habits necessary for “world citizenship.” However, literature does not exist in a vacuum. As Olivera Jokic reminds us in her article “No Country, No Cry,” “Built around state/nation/territory, literature has always lived in the powers of its language, markets, education systems and empire” (783). Under these systems of power, literature in Western liberal education is susceptible to sustaining systems of exclusion and upholding/reproducing epistemological regimes such as hetero-patriarchy, nation-state, settler-colonialism, borders, and other forms of exploitation and oppression. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak warns similarly in her article “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” “A literary text exists between writer and reader. This makes literature peculiarly susceptible to didactic use” (340). Then, what is literature made to do? However, as scholars, we learn that literature holds transformative potential. Reading is framed as an ethical act where the reader gets access to the represented experiences of others, and they are invited to reflect on their positionalities. If so, what are the ethics of reading? How should we read without reproducing epistemological regimes? Why/how do some texts challenge our ingrained ethics? Are institutions (like the university) antagonistic in the reading process? As we grapple with these questions, we hope this conference provides a space to reflect on the consumption of literature, the reading market, and our ethical responsibility as scholars, thinkers, and activists toward literary pieces.

Some contributions might explore, but are not limited to, the following lines of investigation:

1.  Reading practices: affective reading, reparative reading, surface vs. symptomatic reading, reading against whiteness, and queer reading

2.  Reading morality and immorality: moral criticism, didactic reading, queer immoralism, and obscene reading

3.  Reading and/or narrating the body: bodies as sites of inscription, corporeal narratology, biopolitics, performative body, disembodiment, and testimony

4.  Reading and/or narrating the margins: counterpublics, oral histories, intersectional archives, minor literature, and borderlands

5.  Literature and power: propaganda/state, narrating the nation (e.g. imagined communities), postcolonial nation-building, queer citizenship, racial capitalism

7.  Literature and Humanism: liberal humanism, literary communities (such as book clubs or interpretive communities)

8.  Representation and its limits: the unrepresentable (trauma), the inexplicable, and the untranslatable

9. Literature and language: multilingualism, translation, semiotics, queer linguistics, and language ideology