Reading in Space

Peter McDonald

J. Hillis Miller's carefully crafted phrase 'the ethics of reading', which first entered academic debate as the title of a lecture series he gave in 1985, has now become an established part of the critical lexicon. Over the past twenty or so years it has appeared in a host of scholarly articles and featured in a diverse range of book titles from John Dagenais's The Ethics of Reading Manuscript Culture (1994) to Derek Attridge's J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004). More recently it has even begun to take on a life of its own in the popular media. Earlier this year it also acquired a new status by setting the terms for an ambitious interdisciplinary programme in the humanities entitled 'Ethics of Reading: The Humanities and Professional Cultures', which is being led by the Yale professor of Comparative Literature Peter Brooks and sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. In my contribution to this conference I shall begin by briefly considering the origins and history of this canonical phrase, and end by reflecting on its value and limitations, particularly in the context of some recent debates about the materiality of culture and the rise of the new formalism.