Abstract
This chapter discusses a range of approaches to the intersections of literature and ethics. After a brief historical perspective on debates waged in relation to literature and ethics, a number of approaches are presented that are characteristic of the ethical turn: criticism inspired by the neo-Aristotelian humanist tradition in moral philosophy, rhetorical criticism, poststructuralist and deconstructive criticism, social and cultural criticism, and criticism rooted in philosophical hermeneutics. The chapter then sketches a number of sociological, cognitive, and psychological approaches that seek to support or qualify claims about literature’s ethical potential or position these within broader negotiations of value in culture. The concluding remarks address among others the value-laden nature of the discussed approaches and the need for interdisciplinary research in this area.
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Notes
- 1.
For clarity’s sake, we will distinguish between morality/moral and ethics/ethical, a common though not systematic distinction in everyday and scholarly language use: we take moral/morality to refer to prescriptive ideas about right and wrong, based on—usually—collectively shared principles of conduct, norms, and values that are expected to underlie individual choice and responsibility in concrete situations; ethical/ethics is understood as referring to critical reflection upon moral issues.
- 2.
This notion was coined by the Austrian writer, a master of ambivalence and ethical reflection, Robert Musil (1978, 1351).
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Korthals Altes, L., Meretoja, H. (2018). Ethics and Literature. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_28
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