The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge’s Academic Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance

Abstract

In addition to affording readers with the critical machinery for exploring the function of concepts such as truth and goodness in narratives, ethical criticism provides us with a useful rhetoric for examining the depiction of love in literary works. “Contemporary philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue,” Iris Murdoch observes in The Sovereignty of Good, “and although they constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love” (2). Because of its abiding interest in establishing vital interconnections between the reader and the text, ethical criticism devotes particular attention to highlighting the emotional transactions through which literary characters indulge their desires to give and receive affection. The investigation of their intimate motives and experiences likewise illuminates our own conceptions of the impulse for love and its role in the interpersonal fabric of the human community.