An ethics of reading: The broken beauties of Toni Morrison, Nawal El Saadawi, and Arundhati Roy (Arundhati Roy)

In the novels of Toni Morrison, Nawal El Saadawi and Arundhati Roy, torture expresses the violence of slavery, religious fundamentalism and poverty. Rather than simply revealing loss and diminishment, the areas of criticism most literary critics have focused on in the last thirty years, such works expose the possibility for transformation through transgressive narratives that discover a sense of wholeness through moral and spiritual defiance and a redefinition of beauty. Especially in fiction that explores a postcolonial response to repression, torture often functions as reality and metaphor.; Thus, contemporary, postcolonial fiction demands an ethics of reading. An ethical reading involves more than the narrow reading permitted by the critics who espouse a politics of identity. To read ethically means to consider a variety of divergent perspectives as the reader engages with, and often wrestles with, the text. Reading ethically challenges the reader to make reading an act of resistance. Therefore, because of such demands, traditional literary criticism can be too confining. In studying Beloved, Woman at Point Zero and The God of Small Things, and reading them ethically, I have relied on art and film critics, cultural, political and social critics as well as literary critics who have rejected the critical traditions of the last thirty years.; I have structured the study to provide for a global contrapuntal reading. Each chapter focuses on a single element and investigates how each text and between the texts the element contributes to an ethical reading. The conclusion, then, establishes why an ethics of reading is a requirement to fully unpack the violence and torture within postcolonial texts.; My study of these three novels proves that an ethical reading requires an unflinching commitment to textual engagement. To acknowledge that narrative is itself memory evoked in a specific landscape is critical to an enlightened reading. A constant awareness of how the narrative shapes itself and is in conversation with other texts is also significant. An ethical reading cannot exist in isolation; for a reading to be ethical, the text must be informed by and engaged with other texts, as well as history and other art forms. An ethical reading must use the analytical techniques behind close reading, but should not be dictated by such tools.