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What follows if the literary work is understood as an event rather than a material object, a set of signs, or an abstract type? The notion of the event has been important in a number of theoretical discourses from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze, Derrida, and Badiou, but in recent years it has played a particularly significant role in accounts of the domain and practice of literature. The title of Terry Eagleton's recent book, The Event of Literature, is one indication of its prominence, although Eagleton does not get very far in its theorization, preferring the weak notion of "strategy'. There has also been strong opposition to the notion of the work as event; see, for instance, the debate between the present author and Peter Lamarque, one of the leading figures in the analytic tradition of philosophical aesthetics.In this chapter author's own work, especially in the arguments of The Singularity of Literature (Attridge, D. (2004). The singularity of literature. London/New York: Routledge), I have followed through some of the consequences of this way of understanding the ontological status of the work of art, drawing in particular on the thinking of Derrida, Levinas, and Blanchot. In this essay, he revisits those claims and offers a fuller development of them, as well as relating them to other accounts of the literary event, and defending them against the critique of philosophers such as Lamarque. In particular, the ethical implications of the eventness of literature is discussed: what is the responsibility of the reader whose activity, in this way of thinking, is what brings the work into being as literature? How does the reader's activity relate to the author's original creative act? What are the reader's ethical responsibilities to the text, to its author, to the culture in which he or she is reading, to the culture in which the work was created? And how does the question of individual responsibility relate to the wider social and political function of literature?

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-47428-5_16

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