Ethical Criticism's Big Bang (Introduction)

Disputatio

The paper offers a qualified endorsement of Terry Eagleton’s striking claim that “a work’s moral outlook … may be secreted as much in its form as its content”. A number of points are raised in defence of the claim: an argument for the inseparability, under certain conditions, of form and content in a literary work; an idea of moral content, not as derived moral principle, but as inward-facing interpretation grounded in an ethical vocabulary; the possibility of internal and external perspectives on fictional characters; and an emphasis on emotions expressed in, rather than caused by, narrative. Three literary examples are explored, to show how vocabulary, syntax, implicature, and tone, contribute to the emergence of moral salience. A consequence drawn is that the ethical stance readers take to a scene or incident is partially shaped by the narrative modes of its presentation. The overall perspective of the paper is that of aesthetic autonomism: the view that the aesthetic value of a ...

In the last chapter, I argued that Smith's and Díaz's treatment of the problems of history and modern globalization and of the relation these have to storytelling is in synch with moral fiction's emphasis on process. This is a key point because, as I discussed earlier, Gardner and I value process as the locus for literature's engagement with the moral; for us, the process of exploration and discovery enabled by a literary text's rhetorical and literary devices, narrative structures, and formal approaches provides the context for literature's moral dimension. Morality in literature is not a lesson deducible from thematic content (Gardner, OMF 14, 108).While White Teeth and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tackle a range of vexatious moral, social, and political problems that persist in the era of modern globalization, such as how reenacting past history can circumscribe moral agency in the present, I argued that their novels' process, their "morality," was located more in their handling of their thematic content than in the material itself. As per the definition I developed in this study, Smith's and Díaz's novels are "moral" not because they illustrate particular moral concepts, questions, or problems, but are "moral" because their deployment of distinctive and innovative literary devices and techniques enables a nuanced, sophisticated examination of moral concepts, questions, and problems, relevant at this juncture in our age of accelerating globalization. 337 Accordingly, my sustained focus on process and narrative, on literary technique, style, and formal approaches is central to articulating what is distinctive about my overarching aim in this project---to rehabilitate the moral as a serious literary and critical category. In what follows, I briefly sum up my major points to offer indications of how other literary critics might find the method of inquiry I have demonstrated in this study useful for their projects, too. As I asserted in my Introduction, I have conceived this project as an intervention in several scholarly debates. For example, my project addresses questions regarding what constitutes a genre, whether texts should be grouped by similar thematic content or by shared literary techniques and devices. One reason this is important is because we literary critics are moving away from categorizing fiction by geographical location or by period. Although I focused mainly on British and US novellength narratives, my approach can be applied to a considerable range of literary texts, from virtually any geographical location or historical period, including much poetry and drama. Though I would not term it "moral poetry," I identify similar kinds of processes in the work of many modernist poets: instead of confronting particular moral paradoxes per se, modernist poets often manifest significant moral impulses in their efforts to revitalize slack language and to represent the overlooked, the commonplace, and the everyday (Olson 22).

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism

2024

2017

2016

of ethics in their works. Questions regarding right and wrong, what the good life might be or what makes a person good or bad have been played out in fiction as diverse as Aesop's fables, Shakespeare's tragic heroes, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mister Pip and uncountable others. The question of the ethical and its relation to literature continued to be relevant at least up until the 1960s. As deconstructive and post-modern criticism developed and scholars became interested in 'theory' in the 1970s and 80s, ethics seemed to be conspicuously absent. David Parker, in his introduction to Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory claims that the book 'starts from the perception that in "advanced" literary circles for most of the 1970s and 1980s, few topics could have been more uninteresting, more dépassé, less likely to attract budding young theorists, than the topic Ethics and Literature.' 5 Although Parker does go on to suggest that ethics never stopped being significant to literary studies his summary of the perception of ethics and literature seems apt. Robert Eaglestone also points to this, at least perceived, omission of ethics in literary studies during this time period. He claims that 'an explicit concern for ethics has been at the heart of literary criticism since its inception in a modern and modernist form at around the time of the First World War,' but that this 'ethical grounding has become insecure.' 6 Eaglestone claims that 'theory', and especially deconstructive theory, faces accusations of 'lacking an ethics, of being amoral.' 7 Geoffrey Galt Harpham identifies the 'Theoretical Era (c. 1968-87)' as a time in which ethics was not deemed relevant to literary thought. He claims that the various schools of thought arising during this time ('semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis') defined themselves against Enlightenment ideals such as '"the universal subject," the "subject of humanism," the "sovereign subject," the "traditional concept of the self."' He argues that ethics, as the discourse which enumerates and comments on the various deeds of

Philosophia, 2007

Without storytelling there is no theory of ethics 3).

2020