Fictional Characters, Real Problems

The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg

New essays from an international team of philosophers and literary scholars
Includes work by widely-known distinguished figures along with some new voices
Uncovers and articulates deep connections between literature and philosophy
Sets out the ground for future research

Fictional Characters, Real Problems

The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg

Description

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity of a kind that is instructively resistant to simplification; reduction to a single element that would constitute literature's defining essence would be no more possible than it could be genuinely illuminating. Yet one dimension of literature that seems to interweave itself throughout its diverse manifestations is still today, as it has been throughout literary history, ethical content. This striking collection of new essays, written by an international team of philosophers and literary scholars, pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content.
After a first section setting out and precisely articulating some particularly helpful ways of reading for ethical content, these five aspects include: (1) the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; (2) the power, importance, and inculcation of what we might call poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding and that special kind of vision's importance in human life; (3) literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; (4) an investigation into some patterns of moral growth and change that can emerge from the philosophical reading of literature; and (5) a consideration of the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature.
In addition to Jane Austen, whose work we encounter frequently and from multiple points of view in this engaging collection, we see Greek tragedy, Homer, Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, E. M. Forster, Andre Breton, Kingsley Amis, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, J. M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace, among others. And the philosophers in this five-strand interweave include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levinas, and a number of recent figures from both Anglophone and continental contexts. All in all, this rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be.

Fictional Characters, Real Problems

The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg

Introduction: Five Ethical Aspects of Literature, Garry L. Hagberg
Part I: Ways of Reading for Ethical Content
1. Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth: Rethinking Ethics by Reading Literature, Nora Hamalainen
2. Caring about Characters, Eileen John
3. Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency, Robert B. Pierce
Part II: Matters of Character
4. Othello's Paradox: The Place of Character in Literary Experience, Garry L. Hagberg
5. Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of Psychology, Noel Carroll
6. Emma's Extravagance: Jane Austen and the Character-Situation Debate, Valerie Wainwright
Part III: Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision
7. The Question of Truth in Literature, Richard Eldridge
8. The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument: Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee, J. Jeremy Wisnewski
9. An Endless Person: Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja at the Limits of Language, Jonathan Strauss
Part IV: Language, Dialogical Identity, and Self-Understanding
10. The Dialogic Self in Hamlet: On How Dramatic Form Transforms Philosophical Inquiry, Tony Gash
11. 'The Power of Conversation': Jane Austen's Persuasion and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics, Richard Dawson
12. Quartet: Wallace's Wittgenstein, Moran's Amis, Stephen Mulhall
Part V: Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth
13. Moral Development in Pride and Prejudice, Alan Goldman
14. The Breadth of Moral Character, Daniel Brudney
15. Learning to be Good (or Bad) in (or Through) Literature, Mitchell S. Green
Part VI: Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts
16. In Praise of Aristotle's Poetics, Humberto Brito
17. Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, The Birth of Aesthetics Out of a Spirit of Civility, Martin Donougho
18. Fate, Philology, Freud, Jules Brody
Index

Fictional Characters, Real Problems

The Search for Ethical Content in Literature

Edited by Garry L. Hagberg

Author Information

Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College, NY

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.

Contributors:

Humberto Brito, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Jules Brody, Harvard University
Daniel Brudney, University of Chicago
Noel Carroll, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Richard Dawson, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Martin Donougho, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College
Tony Gash, University of East Anglia
Alan H. Goldman, College of William & Mary
Mitchell S. Green, University of Connecticut
Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College
Nora Hämäläinen, University of Helsinki
Eileen John, University of Warwick
Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford
Robert B. Pierce, Oberlin College, Ohio
Jonathan Strauss, Miami University, Ohio
Valerie Wainwright, University of Florence
J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Hartwick College