Readings as responsibility : literary interpretation and ethical articulation

This dissertation examines the ways in which two Renaissance writers, Thomas Nashe and Francis Bacon, respond to the issues of community and human agency and the ways in which their responses anticipate and inform some of the key dilemmas of ethical modernity. The study demonstrates that the versions of human agency put forth by both Nashe and Bacon emerge as critical responses to a perceived breakdown of communal reciprocity. Nashe's concept of human agency is grounded in an appeal for a reciprocal community and provides a corrective both to the version of community and agency as a false either/or dichotomy and to theories that deny the value of community and agency. Bacon's vision of an instrumentalized world is, likewise, an understandable response to a perceived breakdown in community. Bacon represents the subordination of ethical projects to the service of absolutism as ethically empowering and as a means of more efficiently facilitating the advancement of collective human agency. In his enthusiastic coupling of natural philosophy and absolutism. Bacon fails to preserve an adequate space between ethical and ideological concerns. As this study points out, linking ethics to ideology is attractive, but such a linkage ultimately undercuts the strength of ethical appeals as well as paradoxically diminishes the potential for strong human agency.