AUTHOR COPY Short Essay Postmedieval fecopoet[h]ics Susan Signe Morrison Department of English, Texas State University-San Marcos, Texas. Abstract To understand the ethical aspect of paying attention to waste, this article is grounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Le ´vinas, who argues that an openness to the ‘Other’ is a sign of the ethical. If we are complacent, we cannot act ethically. The horror, fear, shock and disgust we feel when confronted by waste jolts us out of our complacency. We recognize in waste not only the humanity of the other, but also the affinity the other has to us. Waste is everywhere and deserves, indeed insists on, moral attention. Ethically informed literary criticism may help us to understand how we theorize, manage and are implicated in waste. Only through that understanding might we change our hearts and hope for social action, justice and responsibility. An examination of the Old English poem Beowulf illustrates how we might read in this way. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 150–156. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.6 Can and should literary criticism be politically and/or ethically driven, and if so, how much? Some fear that literary-critical concerns can be forgotten in the flurry to enact ethical and political understandings of texts. Using presentist theory can be threatening. In the 24 April 2009 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmundson rails against the use of ‘readings,’ by which he means ‘the application of an analytical vocabulary y to describe and (usually) judge a work of literary art.’ While Edmundson goes on to perform readings explicitly allied with Longinus, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and Sontag – who presumably are not tainted as are the enemies he cites [‘Marx, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, or whoever’] – he clearly feels under siege, threatened r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 150–156 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/