Cultural Remission, Factographic Literature and Ethical Criticism: An Interview with Leona Toker

Leona Toker is Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (2019). Toker engages in a number of research areas, including narratology, ethical criticism, Gulag literature, and Holocaust literature. In December 2019, Ms. Lan Yun interviewed Toker during her academic visit to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In this interview, Toker approaches the concept of cultural remission and Gulag and Holocaust literature from an ethical perspective, exploring the complex relationship between literary forms and their ethical consequences. She claims that ethical criticism is coming back in new ways and that analysis of the ethics of form may take over from that of the ethics of character behavior as a potential orientation for future studies.