Fictional Characters, Real Problems The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

by Hagberg, Garry L.

• ISBN13: 9780198715719
• ISBN10: 0198715714
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-05-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College, NY

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.

Table of Contents

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