Ethics And Literary Practice

This volume draws together a diverse array of scholars from across the humanities to formulate and address the question of “ethics and literary practice” for a new decade. In taking up a conjunction whose terms remain productively open to question, fifteen essays survey a range of approaches and topics including genre and disciplinary rhetoric, emergence theory and literary signification, the ethics of alterity, of attention, and of aesthetics, the decolonial and the paracritical, neorealism and contingency, analogy and affect, scripture and national literature. From Seamus Heaney to Hannah Arendt, Teresa Brennan to Stanley Cavell, Ronit Matalon to Édouard Glissant, Uwe Timm to Katherena Vermette, Notes for Echo Lake to the Gospel of St. Matthew, these contributions demonstrate how broadly and fruitfully ramifying its organizing inquiry can be. Bringing such multifarious perspectives to the topic feels only more urgent as language, meaning, and expression enter the crucible of a “post-truth” era.

This volume draws together a diverse array of scholars from across the humanities to formulate and address the question of “ethics and literary practice” for a new decade. In taking up a conjunction whose terms remain productively open to question, fifteen essays survey a range of approaches and topics including genre and disciplinary rhetoric, emergence theory and literary signification, the ethics of alterity, of attention, and of aesthetics, the decolonial and the paracritical, neorealism and contingency, analogy and affect, scripture and national literature. From Seamus Heaney to Hannah Arendt, Teresa Brennan to Stanley Cavell, Ronit Matalon to Édouard Glissant, Uwe Timm to Katherena Vermette, Notes for Echo Lake to the Gospel of St. Matthew, these contributions demonstrate how broadly and fruitfully ramifying its organizing inquiry can be. Bringing such multifarious perspectives to the topic feels only more urgent as language, meaning, and expression enter the crucible of a “post-truth” era.

Teaching Ethics through Literature provides in-depth understanding of a new and exciting shift in the fields of English education, Literature, Language Arts, and Literacy through exploring their connections with ethics. The book pioneers an approach to integrating ethics in the teaching of literature. This has become increasingly relevant and necessary in our globally connected age. A key feature of the book is its integration of theory and practice. It begins with a historical survey of the emergence of the ethical turn in Literature education and grounds this on the ideas of influential Ethical Philosophers and Literature scholars. Most importantly, it provides insights into how teachers can engage students in ethical concerns and apply practices of Ethical Criticism using rich on-the-ground case studies of high school Literature teachers in Australia, Singapore and the United States.

Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity offers a new account of the development of Jerome’s work in the period 386-393CE. Focusing on his commentaries, his translation projects, and his work against heresy, it argues that Jerome has a consistent theology of language and embodiment.

Brings together an extensive and varied collection of ninety-one classical and contemporary readings on ethical theory and practice. Integrating literature with philosophy in an innovative way, this anthology uses literary works to enliven and make concrete the ethical theory or applied issues addressed

This book argues for a new reading of the political and ethical through the literatures of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay from 1970-2000. Carlos Amador reads a series of examples from the last dictatorship and the current post-dictatorship period in the Southern Cone, including works by Augusto Roa Bastos, Roberto Bolaño, Ceferino Reato, Horacio Verbitsky, Nelly Richard, Diamela Eltit, and Willy Thayer, with the goal of uncovering the logic behind their conceptions of belonging and rejection. Focusing on theoretical concepts that make possible the formation of any and all communities, this study works towards a vision of literature as essential to the structure of ethics.

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Despite the recent increase in scholarly activity regarding travel writing and the accompanying proliferation of publications relating to the form, its ethical dimensions have yet to be theorized with sufficient rigour. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and modern languages, the contributors in this volume apply themselves to a number of key theoretical questions pertaining to travel writing and ethics, ranging from travel-as-commoditization to encounters with minority languages under threat. Taken collectively, the essays assess key critical legacies from parallel disciplines to the debate so far, such as anthropological theory and postcolonial criticism. Also considered, and of equal significance, are the ethical implications of the form’s parallel genres of writing, such as ethnography and journalism. As some of the contributors argue, innovations in these genres have important implications for the act of theorizing travel writing itself and the mode and spirit in which it continues to be conducted. In the light of such innovations, how might ethical theory maintain its critical edge?