Literature, Interpretation and Ethics

Davis is a renowned scholar of European and particularly French thought . . . One of the strengths of this work is found, as in many of Davis's critical meditations, in the close readings of philosophical encounters-in this case between literature and interpretation-and in his own interpretative engagements with postwar literature and film.

Defending the import of hermeneutics to literary studies as he set out to do in the book's opening pages, Davis constructs a strong case for attending to interpretation in our practices of reading. . . . Literature and the humanities are important, not because they can incontrovertibly make us better people, as has been claimed, but because they help us to orient ourselves to texts, films, speeches, and Others with curiosity and openness, never knowing what-if anything-of value we may discover.

Avril Tynan, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies