It's my guess that many teachers of literature, whether or not they would admit it, secretly regard themselves as teachers of ethics, at least in the important sense that their subject matter frequently raises and even depends on ethical issues, on standards of right and wrong. Such standards affect not just what we teach but how we teach it. They lie behind our hope, if not of "teaching ethics," then at least of influencing our students' critical thinking about such matters as civility, fairness, and justice. Yet this hope remains uncomfortable and often unexpressed, something many of us won't admit, especially to students-because we have also been trained to suppress our own political positions in the classroom, to assume a posture neutral enough to prevent overwhelming students with our temporary authority, to allow for openness and a free exchange of ideas.

The conflict between these wishes-to influence yet to remain neutral-was neatly illustrated for me several years ago in a graduate seminar. One student in the seminar had quickly earned a reputation for making interpretative statements about Tennyson's poems that seemed both interminable and ridiculous. One day, after he had made a particularly choice offering of this kind, we all sat silently, waiting to see how our professor would respond. He hesitated only slightly, looked the student squarely in the eye and said, "That's very true, Mr. Williams, but isn't it just the opposite?"

Over the last twenty years, developments in literary theory have of course complicated the way in which we make judgments about what is "true" or right or correct. These developments have also made such judgments seem more urgent. This urgency can be accounted for in general by the political climate of academia itself, but it arises more particularly from the growing emphasis on cultural studies. That emphasis contextualizes literature as just one of many cultural productions, embedded in history and thus in moral terrain potentially quite different from one's own. A view of cultural artifacts as both producing and being produced by a culture makes them seem more real," the "rights" and "wrongs" of literary figures not merely fictional but bound in complex ways to the lives of actual people.

What this means for "literature courses" is that we are thinking and talking about ethics. But do we acknowledge this? Do students know this is what we're talking about? Does discussing ethical issues constitute "teaching ethics"? How can such discussion be extended to include "professional ethics"?

I faced these questions in a course I teach on autobiography, a genre that calls pronounced attention to the relation between literature and history, between "fiction" and "fact. From the first time I taught the autobiographies I had selected for the course, I sensed that students responded to them differently because of their presumed status as "true"-this no matter how often we addressed the point that any truth made into a story must be, in some measure, a fiction. This "truth value" seemed to make our discussions of ethical questions more careful and probing, partly out of respect for the real person telling the story, the very act of which invoked ethical questions regarding privacy (was it ethical to be, as Rodriguez calls himself, "Mr. Secrets," to reveal others' private lives to a public audience?). The intensity of these discussions also owed to the books' raising issues that many of us had encountered in some form ourselves. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for instance, Harriet Jacobs vilifies slavery as not only immoral but as destructive of any moral code in the culture that allows it. What made possible, my students asked, the oppressive social structure of slavery? If we were part of such a society, would we conform to its definitions of right and wrong? In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien recalls his temptation to evade the draft that sent him to Vietnam. Would we, my students asked, should we fight in what we believed was an unjust or unnecessary war?

The nature of these questions suggests that in order to "do ethics" in the course, I wouldn't need to alter the substance of our inquiry so much as the name I gave it; I would need to refer to such questions as "ethical". I would need, further to discover ways of enabling students to see ethical issues not only in the lives of the writers we were studying but also in their own lives and professions. The ethics-related activities I devised for the course were of three basic kinds: class discussion of "ethics" in general; writing about an ethical issue; and role-playing of a case study. At the semester's start, I bluntly told the students that we were often going to talk about the books in terms of "ethics". We then spent one or two classes simply discussing the word, along with "morality": how the words are related, how different. We discussed the words again whenever we came across them in the texts: In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for instance, Maya Angelou justifies the illegal activities of con men in the black community by stating that "the needs of a society determine its ethics". How does Angelou's use of the word help us to understand what she regards as "right" and "wrong"?

About midway through the course, I asked the students to write informally about affirmative action, evaluating it from the point of view of a "minority student," as Richard Rodriguez does in his controversial book, Hunger of Memory. If they supported affirmative action, they were to justify it to someone critical of it as unfair; if they did not support it, they were to explain why, and (if they thought they were benefiting from it) to decide whether to continue to be part of a program they felt to be unfair or unethical.

Later in the course, I handed out a case study based on the real-life whistle blower case of John LiCari (at Beech Nut Corporation), who believed the company was making apple juice from a concentrate not made from apple. The configuration of LiCari's dilemma roughly paralleled that of Tim O'Brien (mentioned above) as he made his decision about Vietnam. During one class period, students played the roles of various people (in what I at first told them was a fictional company) who were involved in responding to LiCari's claim about unethical practice. The students worked in three separate groups, then compared their result. On the following day, I described the real case on which I had based the exercise. Finally, we discussed the parallels between LiCari's and O'Brien's situations-parallels they saw quite readily: both men had to weigh conflicting loyalties (to principles, self, family, company, or community); and in deciding whether to resist those with power over them, both risked exposure, embarrassment, ostracism. At the conclusion of this discussion, I made what I took to be the summary point not just for this exercise but for our focus on ethics in the course as a whole. I said that the moral or ethical dilemmas described by the writers of the books we had read often seemed acted out on a grand stage (that of slavery, civil rights, war), but that these were really the same kinds of issues they would face in what we might think of as the "everyday "course of events-as business people, engineers, architects, and so on. I wanted them, I said, to see that connection. They nodded.

Yet by the course's end (just a couple of weeks later), when I asked them in an evaluation about "doing ethics" in the course, several of them seemed to recall only vaguely, if at all, that it had come up. This was disheartening, to say the least; still more, it was puzzling. What might account for their response, however, is a point that also helps illuminate the special difficulties of incorporating ethics into a literature course, or perhaps into any humanities course. In science or engineering, ethics will likely seem quite different from the main subject matter of a course, both in content and approach, but in my course-and, I suspect, in many humanities courses-what I regarded as separate "ethics material" must have seemed, to the students, continuous with our other work, enough in keeping with it as to go unobserved by a number of students in the class.

I might, of course, construe this as success, as an integration so effective that it made the material invisible. But given my objectives for the material within the course, this "success" felt more like a failure. I did benefit in a way I think many teachers might from doing ethics in literature courses: I discovered a more explicit and systematic means of engaging issues we discuss anyway, of foregrounding the standards we bring to bear in judging and interpreting those issues. Maybe it was enough that the students in my course benefited generally from interesting and productive discussions; maybe they don't need to know they're doing ethics to learn about ethics. But if they do need this awareness in order to become responsible professionals, then not enough of them recognized the specifically ethical content of our discussions, despite what I regarded as an obvious, even heavy-handed, emphasis on ethics as such. What this may mean for teaching ethics in literature (and perhaps other) courses is that we need to do it more often and to do it even more obviously, by dislocating activities more markedly from the contexts into which we want them to fit.