This paper revisits ethical criticism from a semiotic perspective informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. It first surveys the development of ethical criticism, considering both its contributions to literary studies and the challenges associated with the incorporation of ethics into literary interpretation. It then reviews the ethics of reading, relevant philosophical developments, and Levinas’s contribution to ethical thought, with particular attention to his conception of ethics as first philosophy. Against this background, the paper explores a possible semioethical orientation under a Levinasian rubric for addressing ethical and philosophical dilemmas in literary works. Several key terms are introduced and illustrated through selected literary works and existing Levinasian readings to demonstrate how a Levinas-informed semioethical practice can inform and reconfigure literary interpretation. The paper argues that Levinas’s conception of ethics as first philosophy can (de)familiarize the “alien” character of ethical criticism identified by G. G. Harpham and provide a basis for reconsidering the relationship between ethics, semiotics, and literary interpretation. In this sense, a Levinasian approach opens a space for thinking about ethical semiotics as a way of reorienting ethical sensibility in acts of criticism.