Literature, Interpretation and Ethics

Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is mainly in the field of twentieth-century literature, film and theory.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: ForaysPart I: Literature and the Hermeneutics of Trust1. Does Literature Matter?2. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Hermeneutics of Trust: Ricoeur, Gadamer, Camus3. Derrida, Deconstruction and Radical HermeneuticsPart II: Misreading/Overreading4. Overreading: Intentions, Mistakes and Lies5. Reading and Overreading: Camus’s Whales6. Reading Violence, Violent Reading: Levinas and HermeneuticsPart III: Reading/Ethics7. Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge8. Trauma, Poststructuralism and Ethics9. Ethics, Stories and Reading10. Limits of Reading, Overreading and Ethical Reading: Albert Camus’s La ChuteConclusion: Forays into Good Reading, Bad Reading, Misreading, Overreading and the Hermeneutics of (Guarded) Trust

Davis is a renowned scholar of European and particularly French thought . . . One of the strengths of this work is found, as in many of Davis’s critical meditations, in the close readings of philosophical encounters—in this case between literature and interpretation—and in his own interpretative engagements with postwar literature and film.Defending the import of hermeneutics to literary studies as he set out to do in the book’s opening pages, Davis constructs a strong case for attending to interpretation in our practices of reading. . . . Literature and the humanities are important, not because they can incontrovertibly make us better people, as has been claimed, but because they help us to orient ourselves to texts, films, speeches, and Others with curiosity and openness, never knowing what—if anything—of value we may discover. Avril Tynan, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies