ethics.pdf

Educational Theory, 1997

Virtually all we do involves reading. We read one another's faces and gestures; we interpretand are affected bythe architecture of buildings, the design of a classroom, the style of a haircut. We construe the meaning of the rituals of religious services and university commencements. Like all we do, reading requires a balance of fairness and critical evaluation, of tact and self-protection; and like all we do, reading reveals the self, its preoccupations, and obsessions. Self-protection and critical evaluation: reading is a serious and potentially dangerous activity. Whether we realize it or not, what we read affects what we become. We do well to be on guard, actively challenging the author. Tact and fairness: because in reading, we enter another person's domain. As there arc rituals when we enter someone's home, so too there are ritual observances in reading. Self-revelation: because the reader brings herself -her habits, attitudes, and mentalityto everything she does, centrally to her manner of reading, her interpretive frame. As we read, we too are read: and sometimes we discover ourselves by reflecting on the patterns of our interpretations andmisinterpretations. Like aperson, areading can be rude or pious; it can be abusive or tender; stingy or generous, literal or fanciful; naive or suspicious; religiously, politically, or sexually obsessed; relentlessly tenacious or readily distracted; sensitive, hypersensitive, or obtuse.

CounterText, 2017

The chapters on ethics and / of reading in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents propose two models of responding to literature. Ghosh sees literature as embodying a hunger for Otherness. Miller insists on the ethical authority of a given literary work over the reader, its ethical obligations to the characters within and to the readers it addresses, and the ethical acts and decisions of the characters within the work. Ghosh's account of literature as hunger opens up aesthetics to the question of the ethical, including the ethics of representation, reading, and Othering. Along with Miller's formula for reading ethically, the two chapters offer us an approach that may be termed, after Kwame Anthony Appiah, cosmopolitan reading, made possible by the sympathetic imagination that literature embodies.

Philosophia, 2007

Without storytelling there is no theory of ethics 3).

2014

The essay is an investigation of "the postmodern" in relation to its real or virtual ethical dimension. The approach is both literary and philosophical and the essay proposes that literature can provide valid means to foster "dialogical interpretations" in a pluralist and multicultural world.

Reading as a Philosophical Practice, 2020

This paper explores the different understandings of the word 'ethical' in relation to works by Martha Nussbaum, Derek Attridge, and (perhaps most surprisingly) to Rick Rylance's 2016 'Literature and the Public Good'.

Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 2012

2020

CounterText

Inspired by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's intervention in Reading Literature across Continents, this essay discusses the narrative ethics of two narratives: Olga Horak's first-person narrative from the Holocaust and W. G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001). While Sebald is an internationally acclaimed author, Horak is a Holocaust survivor whose story, orally transmitted to the author of the essay in Sydney in 2013, is presented as written text in Time's Witnesses: Women's Voices from the Holocaust (2017). Even though these narratives are very different, the essay argues that both are possessed of a strong ethical dimension that not only highlights the authors' sense of ethical responsibility, but also that of the reader. This article argues that, first, even in narratives as different as these two, the author's sense of ethical responsibility is closely linked to the reader's ethical obligation; second, as an integral part of the reader's inte...

Interlitteraria, 2018

The author of the article will discuss the problem of validity thinking about the basic statements of Literary Ethics. Though the problems Literary Ethics emphasizes are global and at the same time rather abstract, the efforts of literary researchers to educate readers with the help of novels are understandable but seem ineffectual. Young readers are not capable of understanding complicated texts of the previous century because of the different contents of their mental spaces or the different schemes of thinking. Literary Ethics speaks about the importance of the role of emotions while reading novels, but the spectrum of primary emotions young readers experience while reading complicated literary texts blocks all the ways to deeper understanding and the ability to analyze specific ethical issues encoded in the novels. The theory of emotions explains the situation and in a way rehabilitates young readers. Nevertheless, particular transformations of genres or of the original form of l...