The Ethics in Literature

by Hadfield, Andrew; Rainsford, Dominic; Woods, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780312216535
• ISBN10: 031221653X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts, offering an exemplary display of these new critical habits at work. Each essay combines close reading of literary texts with reference to current theoretical debates, and each in its own way addresses the question of the ethical significance of literature as a vocation or as social institution -- whether it be from the point of view of the author, the professional critic, the general reader, or the nation-state.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Notes on the Contributors	p. viii
Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics	p. 1
Self and History	p. 15
Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen Spender's World Within World	p. 17
'Ethics cannot afford to be nation-blind': Saul Bellow and the Problem of the Victim	p. 38
Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction	p. 52
Agency and Responsibility	p. 71
The Unbearable Lightness of Acts	p. 73
Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad's The Secret Agent	p. 86
John Cheever's The Swimmer and the Abstract Standpoint of Kantian Moral Philosophy	p. 101
Literature, Interpretation and Ethics	p. 117
Understanding and Ethics in Coleridge: Description, Evaluation and Otherness	p. 119
Derrida, Rushdie and the Ethics of Mortality	p. 136
'Role Models', Conversation and the Ethical Drive	p. 152
Sympathy for the Other	p. 167
Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Michele Roberts's In the Red Kitchen: Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical	p. 169
Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin	p. 184
Moral Capacities and Other Constraints	p. 212
Public Morality	p. 229
'Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings': Catachresis in Kant and Coriolanus	p. 231
Literature and Existentialist Ethics in Simone de Beauvoir's 'Moral Period'	p. 248
Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein	p. 262
Index	p. 275
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