The Responsibilities of the Writer
The Responsibilities of the Writer
Like writing, reading so often begins in romance and ends in pragmatism. The author would be protected from the effects of the text and the text protected from the effects of its author's life. The ‘risk of writing’ gives the question ‘Who is speaking?’ its perennial urgency. The Socratic practice of asking the poets what they meant amounts to enjoining the poet not only to be a reader, a literary critic, of his or her own work, but also to take ethical responsibility for that work. The Ethics of Writing offers itself as a ‘shadow of the original conception’: these prospects for reading have instead guided the approach to Plato and Nietzsche. In entitling this work The Ethics of Writing, the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘writing’ are used more to delimit than to expand a field of inquiry. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given.
Keywords: ethics, writing, risk, Socratic practice, Plato, Nietzsche, reading, romance, pragmatism
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
