Agency and Ethics in Literature and Theory

The conceptual frameworks of agency and ethics have become indispensable to contemporary literary studies because they allow us to understand not only what literature represents, but also how texts actively shape power structures, moral relationships, and forms of subjectivity. These concepts help readers explore how characters, communities, and even non-human entities are positioned within narrative worlds, and how literature intervenes in broader cultural and political discourses. Together, agency and ethics illuminate the dynamics of power, responsibility, choice, and moral consequence in literature.

Understanding Agency in Literature

In literary theory, agency refers to the capacity of individuals, groups, or textual entities to act, make choices, and influence outcomes within a narrative. Agency is not limited to overt physical action; it encompasses the ability to assert identity, resist coercive systems, articulate desires, and generate meaning. A character demonstrates agency when they refuse assigned roles, negotiate constraints, or reshape their socio-cultural environment. Such agency may be individual—as seen in protagonists who defy norms—or collective, as in stories where marginalised communities mobilise resistance. Agency can also be embedded in narrative structures: the choice of focalisation, the fragmentation or linearity of plot, and the presence or absence of a narrator can all determine who is granted voice and whose perspectives are marginalised.

Definition of Agency

Agency refers to the capacity of individuals or groups to act, make choices, and influence the world around them. In literature, agency is not merely about physical action—it involves:

• • the ability to articulate desires, identity, and consciousness
  • resistance to forces that oppress, silence, or determine behaviour
  • the power to reshape narratives and futures

In critical theory, agency challenges deterministic models of identity (race, gender, class, environment) and foregrounds the potential for transformation.

Types of Agency in Literary Studies

Individual Agency

Characters acting from personal will—choosing paths, resisting conventions, asserting autonomy.

Collective Agency

Communities acting together, often found in postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous narratives where solidarity replaces lone heroism.

Structural Agency

Characters navigating, negotiating, or subverting systems such as patriarchy, colonialism, or capitalism.

Narrative Agency

The text itself—or its formal devices—shapes perception through:

• • Focalisation
  • Shifts in point of view
  • Fragmented timelines
  • Visual motifs (in graphic novels)

A story may grant or deny agency depending on whose voice is heard or silenced.

Understanding Ethics in Literature

Ethics in literary theory concerns the moral dimensions of storytelling—how texts represent vulnerability, suffering, responsibility, and justice, and how readers are implicated in the act of interpretation. Ethical criticism asks not only what a narrative depicts but what it demands from its audience: What kinds of responses does it encourage? Whose pain does it render visible or invisible? What values and assumptions are smuggled into cultural narratives through plot, characterisation, and genre?

Ethics shifts literary study from a focus on aesthetics alone to a consideration of the consequences of representation. Emmanuel Levinas, a major figure in ethical philosophy, argues that ethics begins with the encounter with the Other, in which the face of another person demands responsibility. Applied to literature, Levinas’s thought positions readers as morally bound to those they encounter in texts. The suffering character is not an object for voyeuristic consumption but a presence that interrupts complacency and calls forth ethical engagement. Literature, therefore, becomes an ethical space in which meanings are formed through responsibility and acknowledgement rather than detached analysis.

Other theorists deepen this ethical discourse. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life highlights how modern political systems can strip individuals of agency and legal protections, reducing them to bodies without rights. Literature that portrays refugees, prisoners, or displaced people exposes this biopolitical violence and asks readers to confront the ethical implications of exclusion. Cathy Caruth’s trauma studies also contribute to this framework by suggesting that trauma resists full narration and returns in repetitive forms, making literature a site where the unspeakable can be approached and where witnessing becomes an ethical act.

Ethics concerns the moral implications of human behaviour, representation, and responsibility. In literature, ethics encompasses:

• • How texts represent suffering, injustice, and vulnerability
  • The obligations of authors and readers toward depicted subjects
  • The consequences of narrative choices on human understanding

Ethics moves literature beyond aesthetics into moral philosophy, asking: What does a story do to us? What does it ask us to care about?

Major Ethical Frameworks in Literature

Levinasian Ethics

Emmanuel Levinas posits that ethics begins in encountering the Other. The presence—face, voice, vulnerability—of another person demands responsibility. In literature:

• • The reader is summoned by the characters’ suffering
  • Empathy interrupts indifference
  • Texts become moral spaces rather than passive entertainment

This is especially powerful in trauma narratives and human rights literature.

Agamben’s Ethics of Bare Life

Giorgio Agamben argues that modern power reduces some people to bare life—existence without political rights (refugees, detainees, caste-outcast bodies, climate migrants). Literature reveals:

• • How states decide who is disposable
  • How narratives expose or resist biopolitical control

Ethical reading means recognising the lives that systems seek to erase.

Postcolonial Ethics

Centres responsibility in retelling suppressed histories and restoring dignity to colonised voices.

Environmental Ethics

Extends moral concern to non-human species and ecosystems, rejecting anthropocentric privilege.

The Interrelationship of Agency and Ethics

Agency and ethics are mutually constitutive frameworks. Agency concerns the capacity to act, while ethics concerns the responsibility that accompanies such action. A literary text that grants agency without ethics risks glorifying violence or domination, whereas a text that engages ethics without agency turns its subjects into passive objects of pity. The most powerful narratives—especially in human rights literature, postcolonial fiction, trauma narratives, and ecopoetics—balance both: they allow characters and communities to act while foregrounding the moral implications of their choices and the systems that constrain them.

This relationship is also evident in narrative techniques. Silence, fragmentation, focalisation, and multimodal forms such as graphic novels can either suppress agency or render it visible in new ways. When a text shifts perspective to a marginalised figure, it not only redistributes agency but also recalibrates the reader’s ethical responsibility. Thus, narrative choices are ethical acts that shape how worlds are imagined and how power is distributed.

A text lacking ethical responsibility risks reproducing violence, voyeurism, or exploitation. Conversely, a text that foregrounds ethics but denies agency risks turning characters into objects of pity rather than subjects of resistance. Balanced narratives—especially in human rights, postcolonial, and ecocritical literature—grant agency to the marginalised while ethically representing their suffering.

Why These Frameworks Matter

Understanding agency and ethics equips scholars to examine literature as a field of negotiation between freedom and responsibility, selfhood and otherness, representation and consequence. Literature does not merely reflect reality; it participates in constructing it by shaping what readers recognise as normal, desirable, or just. Through agency and ethics, texts imagine alternative futures, question dominant ideologies, expose structures of violence, and call readers into forms of ethical relation.

Agency reveals how subjects resist and reconfigure power, while ethics reminds us that such resistance is meaningful only when it acknowledges the lives of others. Together, these concepts transform literary analysis into a deeply relational practice—one in which interpretation becomes not just an intellectual exercise but an ethical encounter with the worlds that literature makes possible.

Understanding agency and ethics helps scholars:

• • Read literature not just as text, but as moral action
  • Recognise how narratives shape identity, power, and social futures
  • Engage literature as a site where alternative worlds—and justice—are imagined

Agency allows characters and communities to act. Ethics ensures those actions have meaning. Together, they transform literature from passive storytelling into a field of responsibility, resistance, and relational being.