Literature and Moral Thought

The Story of the Moral: On the Power of Literature to Define and Refine the Self, 2018

This study employs a hybrid research method. My religious background has led me to find a great affinity for certain literary criticism, that which sees literature as a source for moral thinking and moral decision-making. I offer a history of my transactions with texts, texts that were initially formative for me as a moral thinker, then useful for me in a variety of ways as a teacher of texts, then which I later began to appreciate in a more critical and theoretical way as I developed a deeper understanding of how those texts had influenced me and how they had – or had not – influenced my students. I borrow heavily from the theory and method of autoethnography in this study, in the sense that I will examine a variety of “internal data” from my memories of books, teachers, and classroom situations, along with “external data” including interviews, report cards, lecture notes and exam questions, and will subject my data to a number of critical lenses with the goal of what Anderson (2006) describes as a commitment to “an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (375). Using the lenses of the literary theory and criticism of Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Coles and Aharon Lichtenstein, I will analyze my experiences as a reader and teacher, and I explain how literary works I read and taught can serve as vehicles for the development of a student’s moral sensibility – and how teachers can help facilitate that development. I use my own unique vantage point, that of an Orthodox Jewish boy who initially found friends in secular texts, then found that those texts were among his great teachers of values, to offer a singular perspective on the power of these texts. These lenses, which are (to mix metaphors a bit) filtered through my unique perspective, provide an interpretation that will at first lead me to explore the field of moral education as a whole, if only because I shared many of its desired outcomes in my literature classroom. After a brief overview of this field, I use the work of Hanan Alexander, David Hansen, Carl Rogers, and others to present a more general yet nuanced account of how “spiritual awareness” and the humane fusing of reason and emotion can be fostered in students, with a flexibility and understanding that learning is a way to learn a process, not a process towards a specific set of intellectual goals. I humbly call this hybrid method a literary-auto-ethno-pedogography, as I seek to produce a critical history of my education as a reader and teacher of literature. After an inquiry into my own reading and teaching to understand my own and my students’ development as moral decision makers; I then seek to expand the depth and quantity of moral conversations and bring them to the classrooms of others. As such, my study includes ideas for how to bring about moral conversations in English classrooms, both through student writing and oral exchange, based on ideas from Sheridan Blau, Jeff Wilhelm, David Hansen, Barry Holtz, and others. I conclude with the still unanswered questions that my study has raised for me and for other researchers who share my interest in the relations between secular and religious education and the problem of teaching literature to shape character and refine a reader’s moral sensibility. I also offer some concluding suggestions about how future students and teachers might build on and expand upon my work.

2016

This chapter reviews the two primary ways in which moral issues pertaining to literature are discussed in Anglophone philosophy of art. The first half of this essay looks at the morally relevant influences that literature is thought to have on its audiences, while the second half considers various positions on the question of whether a literary work's moral character affects its artistic value. Since several extensive and incisive surveys of this terrain are already available (Carroll 2000; Gaut 2009, chapter 7), this chapter focuses on points of contention and subsequent developments. Part One: Literature's Morally Relevant Influences Moral judgment is a common feature of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating literary works. For example, we often attribute virtues or vices to characters and praise or condemn their actions on explicitly moral grounds. Moral judgment is even written into many of the concepts we use to understand literary works: just think, for instance, of the very notion of villain. A skeptic about the moral criticism of literature might point out that the moral judgments just mentioned pertain to diegetic elements of literary works-that is, to things within the world that a literary work describes-and that these judgments may diverge starkly from moral judgments we might make about the work itself. While a literary work might, for instance, tell the story of a mean and nasty person who deliberately hurts others, this does not make the work itself mean and nasty; the moral valence of diegetic elements, our skeptic is quick to point out, is conceptually distinct from the moral valence of the work itself. Further, our skeptic persists, while it is not difficult to acknowledge the moral valence of diegetic elements-after all, persons and their conduct are paradigmatic objects of moral assessment-it is far from obvious how a literary work itself-which is inanimate-can be the proper object of moral judgment.1 By what right, if any, do we make moral judgments about literary works themselves? Although few Anglophone philosophers of art directly attend to this question, the tradition does implicitly offer a compelling answer: namely that a literary work's moral valence lies in its influence on its audience. To be more specific, most philosophers working in this tradition appear to implicitly hold that a literary work is mmally meritorious or mmally flawed insofar as it has, or aims to have, a morally salutary or mmally deleterious influence,

Moral Thought and Moral Judgment This book is concerned with the ways in which moral thought involves more, including ending in more, than moral judgment as that is usually understood within standard moral theorising. What this claim, I hope it will become clear, entails is that moral thought and understanding are much more demanding of us, and in more varied ways, that moral theorists generally suppose. So, for example, it requires more than an intellectual grasp of moral concepts and principles, what follows from them, how they are to be ordered, integrated (or rendered consistent) and applied to specific situations and so on; though I recognise that there are undoubtedly many complex issues and problems that fall under this general head. In defending this claim, I will at various points make specific reference to literature. I do this as it seems plain that at least some literature is concerned with and involves moral thought even though such literature is far from what we would generally call moral philosophy, at least as that is understood by moral theorist. I am aware of course that some moral philosophers, Martha Nussbaum most prominently (Nussbaum 1990), have claimed that literature can be moral philosophy. However, I shall argue that such an assimilation stands in danger of missing the particular contribution that literature might make to moral thought beyond moral theorising, though that argument will only become clear as I discus the particular ways in which moral theorising is insufficient for and potentially distorts serious moral thought. This chapter makes a start on that project, by reflecting of a work of literature and a writer who has very commonly been taken, including by philosophers, to be engaging in moral thinking and judging in their work. I am alluding here to Jane Austen and the particular work I will consider is her novel Emma.

Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 2012

2014

Abstract. This paper examines a variety of perspectives on the role of literature in moral education. These proceed from general considerations to more specific issues that remain contested to the present day, such as distinction between individual and social morality. Others bring any literature under suspicion in the post-structuralist era, such as the cultural relativity of morality, distinctions between aesthetic and moral dimensions of literary works, and between moral awareness and behavior. The discussion is illustrated through considerations of the place of literature in English moral education from the Victorians to the present day. The discussion of dilemmas that policy makers and educators face today focuses on three dilemmas that often serve to question a possibility of justifying the morally educative power of literature: cultural relativism in literature and ideology (and its implications for the canon), the distinction between an aesthetic and moral power of literatur...

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).

Zbornik Instituta Za Pedagoska Istrazivanja, 2006

This paper examines a variety of perspectives on the role of literature in moral education. These proceed from general considerations to more specific issues that remain contested to the present day, such as distinction between individual and social morality. Others bring any literature under suspicion in the post-structuralist era, such as the cultural relativity of morality, distinctions between aesthetic and moral dimensions of literary works, and between moral awareness and behavior. The discussion is illustrated through considerations of the place of literature in English moral education from the Victorians to the present day. The discussion of dilemmas that policy makers and educators face today focuses on three dilemmas that often serve to question a possibility of justifying the morally educative power of literature: cultural relativism in literature and ideology (and its implications for the canon), the distinction between an aesthetic and moral power of literature, and finally, the doubts about the transferability of moral awareness acquired through literature to actual moral conduct.