Abstract

Discussions of modernity and Enlightenment in contemporary ethico-political theory inevitably have to engage the ethics of Immanuel Kant, and contemporary neo-Kantian Liberalism. Against this Kantian tradition, contemporary theorists offer "transformative" frameworks which, although rejecting the universalism and formalism of the Kantian project, recapitulate his emphasis on negative freedom. Although these critiques unmask relationships of power and discourse mystified by the Kantian Liberal tradition, they do not allow for a recuperative hermeneutics which can both critique and sustain the Kantian tradition. This focus on Kant as the crucial figure in the Enlightenment obscures currents in Eighteenth-Century literature in which an Eighteenth-Century ethico-political tradition based on storytelling and narrative maintains Enlightenment values of rational, phenomenological inquiry and a commits to universalism while also maintaining a sensitivity to problems of language and difference. This "concrete theorization" creates a recuperative ethical hermeneutic that anticipates current trends in ethico-political theory, while also offering a challenge to current historicizations of Enlightenment and Modernity. ;This dissertation investigates how three Eighteenth-century literary texts offer a brief survey of this tradition. The poems and period reading context of Colonial American Phillis Wheatley are placed in dialogue with the contemporary frameworks of Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigary, Jurgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, to establish the view that Wheatley's performative treatments of gender and race in her poetry articulate a view of the politics of recognition which address blindspots in contemporary treatments of these issues. French novelist Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne is read first in the context of the Eighteenth-century discourses of sociability and the reshaping of public space in the culture of the salonnieres to illustrate how Graffigny's treatment of gender and colonialism draws upon this tradition to form a dialogic critique which identifies mystified workings of patriarchal and colonial power while still recuperating Enlightenment values of universalism and sociabilite. Finally, Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man is read in light of Pope's articulation of a language-based ethics which, although drawing on antecedents from Augustine to Malebranche, anticipates and informs a reading of Levinas's though, and vice versa