'Lessons of variety and freedom': Reading and ethics in China and the West

This dissertation is a study in comparative hermeneutics, in which I investigate how and why the reading of poetic texts has been linked with the highest development of human ethical potential in both Chinese and Western literary thought. The first chapter of the dissertation lays out a brief history of the relationship between reading and ethics in the West and contrasts this with notions of reading in the Chinese tradition, focusing on the problem of "intent," zhi. I then argue for a relationship between reading and ethics in the Chinese tradition that is not dependent upon the reader's recovery of authorial virtue, comparing the ideas of the Italian social historian Giambattista Vico with the Confucian Analects. The second chapter pursues the question of ethics and reading in relation to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I argue that Finnegans Wake is essentially about the ethical questions involved in hermeneutics, since Joyce foregrounds problems of interpretation, both in the difficulty that his novel presents to its readers and in the figures for the reader within the text, most importantly the Four and the ass. Just as the Four and the ass stand as oppositional figures for the reader, the philosophical stance of Zhuangzi offers an alternative to the dominant Confucian hermeneutic. In the third chapter, I derive out of the Zhuangzi an alternative form of reading, which links reading with ethical work outside of the Confucian model. The fourth chapter examines the under-explored relationship between Finnegans Wake and William Carlos Williams's long poem Paterson, both of which posit reading as a creative and ethical act. The ultimate expression of this concept that we find in Paterson is the equation of reading with love. In the final chapter of the dissertation, I offer readings of several poems from the Classic of Poetry, Shi jing, which have posed particular challenges to the Confucian hermeneutic. I argue that the ethical maintenance of the human world is enacted by the poems of the Shi jing in ways that go far beyond the restriction of meaning imposed by traditional commentary.