Fictional Characters, Real Problems (eBook, PDF)

The Search for Ethical Content in Literature
Redaktion: Hagberg, Garry L.

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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, André 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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. März 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780191024818
• Artikelnr.: 48794135

Autorenporträt

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.

Inhaltsangabe

* Introduction: Five Ethical Aspects of Literature
* Part I: Ways of Reading for Ethical Content
* 1: Nora Hämäläinen: Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth: Rethinking Ethics by
Reading Literature
* 2: Eileen John: Caring about Characters
* 3: Robert B. Pierce: Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency
* Part II: Matters of Character
* 4: Garry L. Hagberg: Othello's Paradox: The Place of Character in
Literary Experience
* 5: Noel Carroll: Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of
Psychology
* 6: Valerie Wainwright: Emma's Extravagance: Jane Austen and the
Character-Situation Debate
* Part III: Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision
* 7: Richard Eldridge: The Question of Truth in Literature
* 8: J. Jeremy Wisnewski: The Moral Relevance of Literature and the
Limits of Argument: Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee
* 9: Jonathan Strauss: An Endless Person: Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja
at the Limits of Language
* Part IV: Language, Dialogical Identity, and Self-Understanding
* 10: Tony Gash: The Dialogic Self in Hamlet: On How Dramatic Form
Transforms Philosophical Inquiry
* 11: Richard Dawson: 'The Power of Conversation': Jane Austen's
Persuasion and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics
* 12: Stephen Mulhall: Quartet: Wallace's Wittgenstein, Moran's Amis
* Part V: Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth
* 13: Alan Goldman: Moral Development in Pride and Prejudice
* 14: Daniel Brudney: The Breadth of Moral Character
* 15: Mitchell S. Green: Learning to be Good (or Bad) in (or Through)
Literature
* Part VI: Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts
* 16: Humberto Brito: In Praise of Aristotle's Poetics
* 17: Martin Donougho: Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, The Birth of
Aesthetics Out of a Spirit of Civility
* 18: Jules Brody: Fate, Philology, Freud
* Index