Abstract

My dissertation argues that Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy reorients debates between literary theory and reading practice by refiguring difference as the origin and necessity of ethical responsibility. Levinas locates the origin of ethical responsibility in the relation to the absolute alterity of the other person. I employ this understanding of difference as constitutive of the ethical relation in order to analyze subjects of captivity in Hawthorne, Jacobs and Levinas---from Aylmer's psychological obsession in "The Birth-Mark", to Hester Prynne's persecution by the letter in The Scarlet Letter, to Jacob's enslavement and subsequent voluntary captivity in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to Levinas's notion of exorbitant responsibility to the other that eventually takes the form of a "persecuted subject." Examining the relation of theory and practice in terms of Levinasian ethical responsibility, I investigate the ways in which Hawthorne's and Jacobs's texts are ultimately both hospitable and resistant to Levinasian reading. Analyzing allegory in Hawthorne's tale "The Birth-Mark" I develop a Levinasian reading practice. Probing the performative rhetoric of the law and the feminine in The Scarlet Letter, I demonstrate that Hester's resumption of the letter is not a subjection to the letter of the law, but a reinscription of its office in ethical terms that become legible through an understanding of Levinasian responsibility. This analysis also reveals how Levinas's concept of the feminine potentially destabilizes his philosophy by repeating the appropriative drive it contests. Levinas's elaboration of ethical substitution and the maternal helps to interpret the interwoven logics of self-sacrifice and self-preservation in Jacobs's Incidents as a specifically ethical obligation to the other. A literary work with overtly political aims, however, Jacobs's text also challenges both Hawthornian allegory and Levinasian metaethics, revealing how their excessive devotion to the promise of the future can allow for injustice in the present. The Coda argues that Levinasian reading entails the ongoing revision of theoretical paradigms through a continual adjudication of competing interpretive strategies.