Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

Oxford: Oxford University Press UK (2016)
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Abstract

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity, one dimension of which is ethical content. This striking collection of new essays pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. These aspects are: the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; patterns of moral growth and change that emerge from the philosophical reading of literature; and the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. The volume engages with literary work from Homer to J. M. Coetzee, Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, and explores the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and others. This rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be.

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