Can Literature Help Make Us Less Racist?

• In Event: Aesthetics, Anti-racism, and Democracy

Abstract

Can literature help make us less racist? This was one of the questions of “ethical criticism”: a
movement that emerged in literary studies in the United States in the early 1990s, and that
has since spread to countries including Great Britain, France, Italy, and China. As one of its
earliest theoreticians writes, “ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a
storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener.” It began when Paul Moses, a Black
assistant professor at the University of Chicago, refused to teach “Huckleberry Finn because it
was to him racist.” 30 years later, in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter, reading lists
proliferated along similar lines: explaining how fiction could help improve White readers’
empathy and understanding.

How should we understand this approach to literature? Where does it come from?
What are its politics? To begin to answer these questions, the paper proposes we turn back
to the origin of ethical criticism. It first situates ethical criticism as a response to
postmodernism, as a shift from a model interested in play, rhetoric and pleasure, to one
interested in sympathy, hermeneutics, and compassion. It then points to ethical criticism’s
connection to liberalism: arguing that ethical criticism serves as a liberal, democratic political
aesthetic, designed to rival communist and fascist equivalents.

These contexts help us see the possible shortcomings of ethical criticism – both as an
interpretative framework for understanding literature – and as a political position designed to
upturn people’s prejudices.

Author

• Katie Ebner-Landy, Harvard University Society of Fellows