Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity
of a kind that is instructively resistant to simplification;
reduction to a single element that would constitute literature's
defining essence would be no more possible than it could be
genuinely illuminating. Yet one dimension of literature that seems
to interweave itself throughout its diverse manifestations is still
today, as it has been throughout literary history, ethical content.
This striking collection of new essays, written by an international
team of philosophers and literary scholars, pursues a fuller and
richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical
content. After a first section setting out and precisely
articulating some particularly helpful ways of reading for ethical
content, these five aspects include: (1) the question of character,
its formation, and its role in moral discernment; (2) the power,
importance, and inculcation of what we might call poetic vision in
the context of ethical understanding and that special kind of
vision's importance in human life; (3) literature's distinctive
role in self-identity and self-understanding; (4) an investigation
into some patterns of moral growth and change that can emerge from
the philosophical reading of literature; and (5) a consideration of
the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central
contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. In
addition to Jane Austen, whose work we encounter frequently and
from multiple points of view in this engaging collection, we see
Greek tragedy, Homer, Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, E. M. Forster,
Andre Breton, Kingsley Amis, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, J.
M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace, among others. And the
philosophers in this five-strand interweave include Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Kant, Hegel, Freud,
Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levinas, and a number of recent
figures from both Anglophone and continental contexts. All in all,
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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