The heterological writer and the gift of art: Writers on writing, ethics, and performativity in twentieth century America

My dissertation argues that Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Norman Mailer are what I call heterological writers that is, they theorize that the work of art encourages multiple and sometimes contradictory interpretations, they show concern regarding the ethics of representing the Other, and they consider the act of theorizing to be a complementary ethical gesture to the writing of fiction. I chose these authors because of their public theorizing about the purpose and function of art after WWII, a time that gave rise to multiple concerns about art's purpose and the author's role in America. In responding to such issues and in producing art, these artists create texts that act as gifts---their literature keeps its secrets and yet gives itself continually to re-interpretation. At the same time, literature does have unpredictable effects on readers and hence an ethical dimension. My intervention in the field is to consider both the ethics of writing and the ethics of reading through these authors' theories and their fiction, ultimately showing how the ethics of literature is not a didactic ethics where a norm of behavior or interpretation is instituted, but rather a performative ethics. These authors create texts that have ethical effects, without instituting an ethical paradigm---the fiction brings something new into the world, prompting a constant re-evaluation of the self in relation to the Other and staging an encounter with alterity. My examination of these particular authors shows how, ironically, the author's act of commenting on his or her work and creating a philosophy of art gestures to the relinquishing of the self in its creation and an acknowledgement that the text both arrives and will be interpreted in unpredictable ways. Rather than ignoring the place of the author, or simply making comparisons between the author's life and fiction, I instead reveal the complexities inherent in the authors' theories of art and their fiction, juxtaposing the two rather than applying one to the other.