For Harpham, ethics is not a source of rules or norms, but a way of structuring questions. Ethics, he argues, involves the stresses and conflicts that arise in confrontation with an "other" -- a human other, but also an otherness within ethics itself. A conflicted discourse, ethics marks the point where literature becomes conceptually rigorous and theory becomes humanized. In addition to deeply original meditations on such subjects as rationality, aesthetics, and "enlightenment", Shadows of Ethics contains probing accounts of the work of such contemporary thinkers as Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Nozick, and Martha Nussbaum. In a final essay called "Imagining the Center", Harpham attacks the current academic obsession with marginality and challenges critics to occupy -- imaginatively and theoretically -- a position of political and intellectual power.

Shadows of Ethics will interest literary critics, scholars in philosophy and postmodernism, and theorists interested in the relationship between ethics and their discipline.