"Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavour to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us. The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a 'hermeneutics of (guarded) trust', which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance. Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible, but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities"--

Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us. The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance. Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.

This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts, offering an exemplary display of these new critical habits at work. Each essay combines close reading of literary texts with reference to current theoretical debates, and each in its own way addresses the question of the ethical significance of literature as a vocation or as social institution -- whether it be from the point of view of the author, the professional critic, the general reader, or the nation-state.

This is the first book to focus solely on ethics in public service interpreting. Four leading researchers from across Europe share their expertise on ethics, the theory behind ethics, types of ethics, codes of ethics, and what it means to be a public service interpreter. This volume is highly innovative in that it provides the reader with not only a theoretical basis to explain why underlying ethical dilemmas are so common in the field, but it also offers guidelines that are explained and discussed at length and illustrated with examples. Divided into three Parts, this ground-breaking text offers a comprehensive discussion of issues surrounding Public Service Interpreting. Part 1 centres on ethical theories, Part 2 compares and contrasts codes of ethics and includes real-life examples related to ethics, and Part 3 discusses the link between ethics, professional development, and trust. Ethics in Public Service Interpreting serves as both an explanatory and informative core text for students and as a guide or reference book for interpreter trainees as well as for professional interpreters - and for professionals who need an interpreter's assistance in their own work.

Tobin Siebers asserts that literary criticism is essentially a form of ethics. The Ethics of Criticism investigates the moral character of contemporary literary theory, assessing a wide range of theoretical approaches in terms of both the ethical presuppositions underlying the critical claims and the attitudes fostered by the approaches. Building on analyses of the moral legacies of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, Siebers identifies the various fronts on which the concerns of critical theory impinge on those of ethics.

Attridge argues that it is the most discomforting & difficult elements in the work of Coetzee that make his writings so rewarding of study. This book follows the author's lead in exploring a number of issues, including interpretation & literary judgement, & responsibility to the other.

In this timely study, Inghilleri examines the interface between ethics, language, and politics during acts of interpreting, with reference to two particular sites of transnational conflict: the political and judicial context of asylum adjudication and the geo-political context of war. The book characterizes the social and moral spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect the realities of the trans-nationally constituted, locally and globally informed environments in which interpreters work alongside others. One of the core arguments is that the rather restricted notion of neutrality that remains central to translator and interpreter practices does not adequately reflect the complex and paradoxical nature of these socially and politically inscribed encounters and others like them. This study offers an alternative theoretical perspective on language and ethics to those which have shaped and informed translation and interpreting theory and practice in recent years.