NUCB JLCC, 8(2) 2007,- MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN Literature has long been granted an ability to mediate certain aspects of ethics and morality that philosophy, the discipline traditionally overseeing these subjects, has, for many, failed to appreciate fully. Literary criticism regards rhetoric as the sticking point for most philosophies in this regard, even though literary critics such as Paul de Man recognise that the “terminology of philosophers is full of metaphors” (47). De Man thinks that philosophy has for too long either sought to “banish rhetoric from the councils of the philosophers” or to “rehabilitate rhetoric” (48). However, despite the best efforts of critics such as de Man to return an engaged formalism to commentaries on literature and the reading of literature, in recent decades it would appear that literary criticism’s claim to possess a unique aptness for decrypting tropes or revealing the “disfiguring power of figuration” (49) has been challenged. The rise of cultural studies has meant that such markers of disciplinary privilege have been discredited. Theologians, literary critics and sociologists, to name but a selection, can all now be granted an equal hearing when it comes to discussing how figures such as metaphors and symbols might advance the claims of their respective brands of ethical theory. This article examines various aspects of this resurgent, if somewhat disfigured, interest in how rhetoric might mediate certain ethical worldviews. The criticism that privileges the ethical aspects of a text, or that presumes “some ethical moment which underlies criticism” (Eaglestone, 178) goes by the name ethical criticism. There were many publications in the nineties that sought to define such criticism. The interdisciplinarity of post-structuralism and deconstruction allowed critics who were tired of flexing their altruistic muscles contesting themes of canonicity, what John Guillory refers to in terms of ‘a social order with all its various inequities’, i to be transformed into social commentators while never laying down their Proust or their Woolf. The kind of ethical criticism practised, chiefly in the eighties and nineties, can be divided into those more “deconstructive” approaches that have their origins in the language of French phenomenology and the neo- Aristotelian approaches of writers such as Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair McIntyre. This essay primarily deals with the former approach’s borrowing of philosophical concepts such as alterity and difference so as to bolster theories of reading. Ethical criticism has a long history in literary criticism and its resurgence at the hands of phenomenological literary critics has radically refashioned what Northrop Frye envisaged for ethical criticism in one of the most influential works of literary criticism – The Anatomy of Criticism - published fifty years ago this year. In The Anatomy of Criticism Frye defines ethical criticism as a theory of symbols that plays on the notion of the archetype. Frye’s archetypal style of criticism presents “literary experience as a part of the continuum of life, in which one of the poet’s functions is to visualize the goals of human work”. ii Whatever ethical experience Frye alludes to through reading and criticism must privilege, for him, the “continuum of life” between the world, the text, and the writer. The symbol is the essential trope of the ethical critic, for Frye, as it is the “symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience” iii . However, it is Frye’s suggestion that the ethical critic’s Taking Reading Hostage: Ethical Criticism’s Rhetoric of Alterity Nagoya University of Commerce & Business Administration NII-Electronic Library Service