Download or read book Renegotiating Ethics in Literature Philosophy and Theory written by Jane Adamson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Ethics Literature and Theory written by Stephen K. George and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives--from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon--contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy.

Download or read book Timothy Findley s Novels Between Ethics and Postmodernism written by Dagmar Krause and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy Findley (1930-2002) is one of the most important contemporary Canadian writers. His novels have been classified as postmodern, exhibiting characteristic features such as parody, historiographic metafiction, and hybrid genres. This classification of Findley as a postmodern writer, however, largely neglects the fact that Findley is deeply committed to the exploration of certain ethical and political themes. Recurring topics in his work are, for instance, fascism, environmental concerns, and the problem of responsibility. Sparked off by the fascinating question of how postmodernism and ethics can be reconciled at all, and inspired by the so-called ethical turn in the literary theory of the 1990s, this study supplies a closer look at Findley's ethics with regard to its postmodern potential. A detailed analysis of five of his novels (The Wars, Famous Last Words, Not Wanted on the Voyage, The Telling of Lies and Headhunter) explores the ethical dimension of Findleys work and its consequences for his categorization as a postmodern writer.

Download or read book Ian McEwan written by Dominic Head and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

Download or read book Ethical Encounters written by Janne Korkka and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters shows that dividing Wiebe’s work into two sharply distinct categories of ‘Mennonite’ and ‘First Nations’ writings overlooks important connections between the author’s central works and may seriously hinder the interrogation of narrative engagement with alterity. While such human encounters resonate against ethical strategies of representation, the greatest challenge for the ethics of encounter in Wiebe’s texts arises in encounters with the alterity of space. Ethical Encounters engages with both physical and narrative spaces which are not permanently fixed in landscape or geography, or in human perceptions of place, arguing that the most radical expressions of alterity in Wiebe’s writings emerge in encounters with the spaces of the Canadian North. The study raises questions about the relationship between the self and the other as they concern knowing: what does the self know when it claims to know another person or space? How does the narrating self negotiate the seeming collapse of its own knowledge when it encounters others whose stories cannot be known? Ethical Encounters casts new light not just on Wiebe’s writings but also on how we as authors and readers engage with expressions of alterity which refuse to be transformed into familiar, knowable forms. Janne Korkka is post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the North American Studies programme in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests lie in the problems of representing space and encountering alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). He teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures and North American Studies, and publishes mainly on Canadian writing.

Download or read book Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill written by Bridget Vincent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers—including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens written by Robert L. Patten and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Download or read book Key Terms in Ethics written by Oskari Kuusela and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and major works in the history of this key area of philosophical thought. An indispensable compass for students coming to the subject for the first time and a very handy for more advanced undergraduate students as a reference tool.

Download or read book Moral Philosophers and the Novel written by P. Johnson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating study, Peter Johnson makes explicit the issues involved in using the novel as a source in moral philosophy. The book pays close attention to questions of method, aesthetic accounts of the novel and the nature of ethical knowledge. The views of leading philosophers are examined and criticised in the light of the book's distinctive contribution to the current debate.

Download or read book Coping with Difference written by Sabine Nunius and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2009 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has British literature finally surpassed Postmodernism and are we thus currently witnessing the emergence of a new era? Choosing specific forms of engagement with difference as a starting point, the present study traces recent developments in the field of the novel and illustrates in how far these new ways of dealing with difference may be characterised as "non-postmodern". Moreover, the analysis aims to demonstrate the renewed importance of modern(ist) strategies and their employment in contemporary British fiction. Case studies of six novels complement and illuminate these findings.

Download or read book Prophets of the Posthuman written by Christina Bieber Lake and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prophets of the Posthuman provides a fresh and original reading of fictional narratives that raise the question of what it means to be human in the face of rapidly developing bioenhancement technologies. Christina Bieber Lake argues that works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, Raymond Carver, James Tiptree, Jr., and Margaret Atwood must be reevaluated in light of their contributions to larger ethical questions. Drawing on a wide range of sources in philosophical and theological ethics, Lake claims that these writers share a commitment to maintaining a category of personhood more meaningful than that allowed by utilitarian ethics. Prophets of the Posthuman insists that because technology can never ask whether we should do something that we have the power to do, literature must step into that role. Each of the chapters of this interdisciplinary study sets up a typical ethical scenario regarding human enhancement technology and then illustrates how a work of fiction uniquely speaks to that scenario, exposing a realm of human motivations that might otherwise be overlooked or simplified. Through the vision of the writers she discusses, Lake uncovers a deep critique of the ascendancy of personal autonomy as America’s most cherished value. This ascendancy, coupled with technology’s glamorous promises of happiness, helps to shape a utilitarian view of persons that makes responsible ethical behavior toward one another almost impossible. Prophets of the Posthuman charts the essential role that literature must play in the continuing conversation of what it means to be human in a posthuman world.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Ethics written by Harry J. Gensler and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historical Dictionary of Ethics covers a broad range of topics, including theories, issues, and concepts; historical periods and historical figures; applied ethics; non-Western approaches; and related disciplines. Harry J. Gensler and Earl W. Spurgin tackle such issues as abortion, capital punishment, stem-cell research, and terrorism and explain such key theories as utilitarianism, natural law, social contract, and virtue ethics. This reference provides a complete overview of ethics through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries, including bioethics, business ethics, Aristotle, Hobbes, autonomy, confidentiality, Confucius, and psychology."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The A to Z of Ethics written by Harry J. Gensler and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-02-12 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The A to Z of Ethics covers a very broad range of ethical topics, including ethical theories, historical periods, historical figures, applied ethics, ethical issues, ethical concepts, non-Western approaches, and related disciplines. Harry J. Gensler and Earl W. Spurgin tackle such issues as abortion, capital punishment, stem cell research, and terrorism while also explaining key theories like utilitarianism, natural law, social contract, and virtue ethics. This reference provides a complete overview of ethics through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries, including bioethics, business ethics, Aristotle, Hobbes, autonomy, confidentiality, Confucius, and psychology.

Download or read book On the Turn written by Bárbara Arizti and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English is an attempt to listen to the various voices that participate in the current dialogue on the relationship between fiction and ethics. The editors’ introduction investigates the current state of affairs on the return to ethics in critical and literary consideration, and it opens up the way for the variety of approaches that follows. Participants include internationally recognized scholars like Andrew Gibson, Patricia Waugh, or Native American fiction writer and poet Gordon Henry, winner of the American Book Award in 1995. All in all, contributors cover a significant geographical diversity, and their approaches also vary from general theory to particular examples, from traditional interpretations to post-deconstruction ethics. Authors analyze texts both mainstream and marginal, colonial and postcolonial; they examine the ethics of race, gender and sexuality; the ethics of self-positioning and orientation; the ethics of style; the ethics of reception; the ethics of mode and genre; the ethics of extreme situations of evil, disease and fascism. In its search for a better understanding of the global/nationalistic world of today, On the Turn therefore moves beyond the scope of literary criticism into issues of wider, more urgent relevance. What should I, ought I, may I, must I, do, if anything, on the basis of reading, when I have read a literary work? What does reading a literary work authorize, or even command, me to do? Writing an essay about the work would be one response. On the Turn is a wonderfully diverse, learned, challenging, provocative, even sometimes controversial, collection of essays on the ethical dimensions of literature. This book is testimony to the continued lively interest in the ethical turn in literary studies. The authors are, for the most part, concerned with ethical theory and with ethically charged situations in postmodern novels in English, as they shape readers’ values and judgments. Poetry and non-print media are, however, also discussed. J. Hillis Miller UCI Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of California at Irvine The Ethics of Fiction is an important and exciting volume that explores with energy and rigour the connections between ethics and literature. Relating literature to philosophy, neurobiology, politics, religion, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the twenty two contributors richly advance ‘the ethical turn’ recently embraced by many critics. Works by authors such as Ian McEwan, A.S.Byatt, Charles Palliser, Hanif Kureishi, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, George Orwell, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and Paul Auster are presented in a new light and complex topics such as territoriality, the nature of love, Islamophobia and the politics of representation are tackled with imagination and intellectual integrity. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the dialogue between ethics and literature. Avril Horner, Professor of English, Kingston University

Download or read book Iris Murdoch and Morality written by Anne Rowe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Murdoch and Morality provides a close focus on moral issues in Murdoch's novels, philosophy and theology. It situates Murdoch within current theoretical debates and develops an understanding of her work as a crucial link between twentieth and twenty-first century writing and theory.

Download or read book Du Fu Transforms written by Lucas Rambo Bender and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often considered China’s greatest poet, Du Fu (712–770) came of age at the height of the Tang dynasty, in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the precedent cultural tradition would guarantee civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When his society collapsed into civil war in 755, however, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing. In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s reconsideration of the nature and importance of tradition has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. He also looked forward to the transformations his own poetry would undergo as it was elevated to the pinnacle of the Chinese poetic pantheon.

Download or read book The Self in Moral Space written by David Parker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker examines a range of classic and contemporary autobiographies—including those of St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Roland Barthes, Seamus Heaney, and J. M. Coetzee—to reveal a whole domain of life narrative that has been previously ignored, one that enables a new approach to the question of what constitutes a "good" life narrative. Moving from an ethics toward an aesthetics of life writing, Parker follows Wittgenstein's view that ethics and aesthetics are one. The Self in Moral Space is distinctive in that its key ethical question is not What is it right for the life writer to do? but the broader question What is it good to be? This question opens up an important debate with the dominant postmodern paradigms that prevail in life writing studies today. In Parker's estimation, such paradigms are incapable of explaining why life writing matters in the contemporary context. Life narrative, he argues, faces readers with the perennial ethical question How should a human being live? We need a new reconstructive paradigm, as offered by this book, in order to gain a fuller understanding of life narrative and its humanistic potential.