Shawn Rice

Nautical Nihilism: Metaethical Construction in Percy Shelley’s “Alastor”

Ethical criticism, especially recently revived ethical criticism, has steered clear of the extensive body of work in ethics in analytic philosophy. Instead it has remained within the boundaries of the continental tradition, especially drawing on notions of intersubjectivity developed by Jürgen Habermas and poststructural thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas. In this paper, I hope to begin to consider how a detente between the two traditions could be negotiated via the analytic distinction between ethics and metaethics and begin to think about how literary criticism might obtain a dual citizenship in that reconciliation of those historically conflicting traditions.

In order to do this I will like to draw on analytic metaethics to read Percy Shelley’s poem Alastor. Firstly and all too briefly, I will sketch out a general, contemporary discourse of metaethics, focusing on the schools of ethical non-naturalism, projectivism, and moral fictionalism. Then I will model how literary criticism can make use of these schools by reading Shelley.

My reading of Alastor will not focus on decoding any intentional epistemological statements which may have been allegorized. Instead I will attempt to read the linguistic, rather than temporal, construction of the poem to find ontological themes which can be read with metaethical theories to show not a robust system of ethics but a basis on which ethical systems may be built within the boundaries projected by Shelley’s poem.

Ultimately, I will use this reading to argue that literary criticism could benefit by paying attention to metaethics.

Shawn Rice is a hopelessly confused student who has an attention span cultivated by MTV and Robot Chicken.  Hence his papers are either fast-paced, stimulating, and entertaining, or they’re just plain unbearable.