Skirting the Ethical - (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) by Carol Jacobs (Paperback)

About the Book

Skirting the Ethical presents highly original readings of six pivotal works that, disrupting our conventional concept of morality, point us towards a non-prescriptive mode of ethics, as an ever-to-be-renewed rethinking that has much to do with the act of interpretation.

Book Synopsis

Skirting the Ethical presents highly original readings of six pivotal works that, disrupting our conventional concept of morality, point us towards a non-prescriptive mode of ethics, as an ever-to-be-renewed rethinking that has much to do with the act of interpretation.

Review Quotes

"It is a wise book, worth reading. . . The book has already prompted me to read two more works by Sebald and to teach the 'Republic' again."--Marianne Constable "Modern Philology"

"This is a superb book, sometimes breathtaking in its readings of central and not-so-canonical texts in the Western tradition. 'Literary' ethics is a rather different matter than that of daily-life decisions about whether or not to so something because it's good (or not). Yet the stakes of these literary and para-literary ethics are high, and Carol Jacobs does an exemplary job in articulating just what is entailed."--Ian Balfour "York University"

About the Author

Carol Jacobs is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her previous books include: The Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), and In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999).