Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Bryce Wallace Humanities

The Ethics of Literary Scholarship and the Burden of Representation: If and How the Humanities Articulate Otherness

Scholars Journal

Bryce’s project examines the newly popular claim that literature and literary criticism are uniquely capable of inspiring ethical improvement in their readers. Through the creative and critical work of James Baldwin, Bryce intends to explore how the assumed normativity in literary scholarship problematically grants critics the power to use their intellectual talent to gain prestige and ethical superiority by taking authoritative stances on the proper representation of minority groups. If the relevance of literary studies is its ethical engagement, such principle notions of moral responsibility must be properly interrogated so that literary scholarship, as an authoritative entity, can transcend the coercive or derogatory forms of normativity that perpetuate the very acts of subordination they claim to uncover.