Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory

by Edited by Jane Adamson , Richard Freadman , David Parker

• ISBN13: 9780521620796
• ISBN10: 0521620791
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed interest in the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the turn to ethics in the 1990s	1	(20)
DAVID PARKER
I: ETHICS, LITERATURE, AND PHILOSOPHY	21	(92)
1 Deepening the self The language of ethics and the language of literature	21	(18)
SIMON HAINES
2 Martha Nussbaum and the need for novels	39	(26)
CORA DIAMOND
3 The concept of dread Sympathy and ethics in Daniel Deronda	65	(19)
LISABETH DURING
4 Against tidiness Literature and/versus moral philosophy	84	(29)
JANE ADAMSON
II: ETHICS AND AGENCY	113	(88)
5 What differences can contemporary poetry make in our moral thinking?	113	(21)
CHARLES ALTIERI
6 Moral luck in Paris: A Moveable Feast and the ethics of autobiography	134	(27)
RICHARD FREADMAN
7 The unseemly profession Privacy, inviolate personality, and the ethics of life writing	161	(20)
PAUL JOHN EAKIN
8 The patient writes back Bioethics and the illness narrative	181	(20)
JOHN WILTSHIRE
III: POLITICS AND ETHICS	201	(88)
9 Literature, power, and the recovery of philosophical ethics	201	(21)
C. A. J. COADY
SEUMAS MILLER
10 The literary imagination in public life	222	(25)
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
11 Ethics in many different voices	247	(22)
ANNETTE C. BAIER
12 Common understanding and individual voices	269	(20)
RAIMOND GAITA
Index	289