Fictional characters, real problems : the search for ethical content in literature /

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Bibliographic Details
Edition:	First edition.
Imprint:	Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016.
Description:	xii, 389 pages ; 25 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Ethics in literature. Literature and morals. Ethics in literature Literature and morals.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10770609

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	Hagberg, Garry, 1952- editor.
ISBN:	9780198715719 0198715714
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 367-382) and index.
Summary:	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.--

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction: Five Ethical Aspects of Literature
Part I. Ways of Reading for Ethical Content
1. Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth-Rethinking Ethics by Reading Literature
2. Caring about Characters
3. Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency
Part II. Matters of Character
4. Othello's Paradox: The Place of Character in Literary Experience
5. Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of Psychology
6. Emma's Extravagance: Jane Austen and the Character-Situation Debate
Part III. Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision
7. The Question of Truth in Literature: Die poetische Auffassung der Welt
8. The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument: Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee
9. An Endless Person: Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja at the Limits of Language
Part IV. Language, Dialogical Identity, and Self-Understanding
10. The Dialogic Self in Hamlet: On How Dramatic Form Transforms Philosophical Inquiry
11. "The Power of Conversation": Jane Austen's Persuasion and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics
12. Quartet Wallace's Wittgenstein, Moran's Amis
Part V. Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth
13. Moral Development in Pride and Prejudice
14. The Breadth of Moral Character
15. Learning To Be Good (or Bad) in (or Through) Literature
Part VI. Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts
16. In Praise of Aristotle's Poetics
17. Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, the Birth of Aesthetics Out of A Spirit of Civility
18. Fate, Philology, Freud
Bibliography
Index

Fictional characters, real problems : the search for ethical content in literature /

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