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Reading Ethics: Modernism, Narrative, Violence, Katie Dyson

Dissertations

Reading Ethics hinges on the relationship between its two central terms, tracing how modernist narrative innovations reimagined reading as an ethical practice. To ask how we read is to return to a core question for the discipline. Building on recent reevaluations of reading methodologies by Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, and other scholars, I argue that modernist narrative forms foreground the ethical dynamics between text, reader, and world, asking readers to rethink how we understand the world even as they work to build new ones. Focusing on British and American modernist and meta-modernist fiction from writers such as …