Literature and Ethics

The last twenty years have seen a growing interest in the ethical value and ethical significance of literature. Some argue that literary works have moral affects on their readers while some others claim that literature can be approached only from an aesthetical point of view. If literary works have such an effect on the reader, the question is how do they achieve this function? What differs them from other kinds of texts? In this paper my aim is to reveal the peculiar ethical significance of literary works. In order to achieve this aim, I will argue that these works should be approached as fictional and aesthetic texts. Hence, I will also side with autonomist who defends the aesthetic and fictional autonomy of literary works. I will try to show that moralism and autonomism do not have to be formulated as rival camps, rather one can defend the ethical significance of literature by staying in the autonomist sphere. Moreover, one has to stay in the autonomist sphere if she wants to understand the peculiar ethical power of literature; the ethical power of literature as literature.

This course explores ethics and literature, from ancient Greek tragedy to the present. The first half of the course will focus on pre-twentieth-century works, while the second semester will focus on twentieth-and twenty-first-century works, mostly from the United States. The aim of the course is not to provide a comprehensive examination of ethics and literature, but rather to help students develop the skills they need to analyze some of the ethical dimensions of literature. To that end, assignments will be designed to help students develop skills for close reading, seminar presentations, and essay writing. The classes themselves will be primarily discussion based, rather than lecture based, and will require participation from students.

L’impresa del Pro bono malum, stampata all’inizio della princeps dell’ Orlando furioso e presente in varia misura anche nelle edizioni successive, è oggi per lo più interpretata come allusione al problema morale dell’ingratitudine. Il saggio non contesta tale interpretazione ma vuole mostrare che questo tema, lungi dall’essere peregrino, ispira tra Quattro e Cinquecento un vivace dibattito di cui si possono riconoscere le tracce anche nel poema di Ariosto. Dopo aver presentato sinteticamente le posizioni di alcuni degli autori che trattano questo tema (Giovanni Antonio Campano, Giovanni Pontano, Luigi Pulci, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi), lo studio propone un’analisi dell’Orlando furioso che evidenzia lo stretto rapporto che s’instaura nel poema fra la sistematica illustrazione narrativa del diffuso problema dell’ingratitudine, e più in generale dell’ingiusta retribuzione, e la rappresentazione degli effetti passionali di questo vizio, affidata ai numerosi “lamenti” e “furori” che punteggiano il racconto. Scegliendo di concentrarsi sul fenomeno particolare dell’ingratitudine amorosa, tuttavia, Ariosto sottolinea anche ironicamente quanto può esserci di soggettivo o ingenuo nella denuncia di questo vizio, e rivela i limiti di un’interpretazione puramente morale dei comportamenti umani. Il saggio si conclude con un’analisi dell’episodio del viaggio straordinario di Astolfo (Orlando furioso XXXIV-XXXV), in cui questo tema ha grande rilievo, e in particolare del racconto di Lidia, non riducibile secondo l’autore alla funzione di exemplum d’ingratitudine.

This essay considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the "worthier" parts of the body and the citizens' voices in the "worser," leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens'. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians' conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the essay concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

This article is an attempt to interpret the culminant work of the collection
of poems Imiesłowy by Krystyna Miłobędzka. In this paper, based on cultural
and philosophical contexts, the analisys of different meanings of text (especally
metaphoric meaning) was carrried out. The main purpose of the analisys was
to state a role of poem entitled *** [Razić, urazić, porazić, wyrazić…] not only
in the mentioned collection of poems, but also in entire poetic work of Miłobędzka.

In questo saggio l'autore sostiene che la lettura tuttora diffusa del Gattopardo come un romanzo storico scritto da un conservatore non è accettabile. Il Gattopardo va invece interpretato come una saga familiare che racconta uno dei cambiamenti più radicali della società moderna: l’erosione dell’orizzonte di senso della famiglia patriarcale. Per sostenere questa interpretazione del Gattopardo l'autore riconsidera anzitutto le scelte di vita di Lampedusa e la sua concezione della politica. Poi commenta le sue riflessioni sulla letteratura e mostra come sia la stesura dei Ricordi a convincerlo a scrivere una saga familiare. Il saggio si chiude con un’analisi del Gattopardo, dove si mostra come sia il suo stile narrativo, che l'autore chiama “realismo modernista”, a condurre lettrici e lettori a immaginare dall’interno la scomparsa dell’orizzonte della famiglia patriarcale.

The purpose of our collection of essays is to frame Shakespeare’s representation of human moral choice within the context of intellectual history. The contributors extend the Cambridge method of moderate contextualism from its origins, the study of political philosophy, to a parallel study of Shakespeare’s thought about ethics, situating Shakespeare’s ideas within contemporary debate about rival, overlapping moral paradigms. Christianity, Skepticism, Epicureanism: these and other such schools of thought serve as examples of Pocock’s “languages,” but in the realm of moral philosophy, rather than political. The collection also places Shakespeare in dialogue with a representative Continental analogue, Montaigne. Our animating premise is that Shakespeare's ideas about ethics can be best understood within a larger historical frame: sources, paradigms, and problems already extant and even highly elaborated, well before Shakespeare himself ever set pen to page. The terminus a quo is just as important as the terminus ad quem: as Bacon writes, “Things in themselves new will yet be apprehended with reference to what is old." Shakespeare’s perspective on morality does not emerge ex nihilo, the product of an inexplicable rupture, but instead draws upon a rich variety of intellectual traditions, Christian as well as classical, even in its moments of most ardent critique. The choice of the term “Renaissance” for the title, for example, rather than “early modern,” is deliberate: our hope is to foreground the resurgence of classical paradigms in this period. Over the course of Shakespeare’s life, new moral systems such as Neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism challenged prevailing ethical assumptions, began to contest the preeminence of Christianity, and laid the groundwork for what we now call “modernity”: Charles Taylor’s “secular age.”

Dosadašnju recepciju Priča iz davnine Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić u velikoj je mjeri usmjeravala pitanje načina na koje je naslijeđe slavenske mitologije utjecalo na genezu ove prozne zbirke. Podrazumijevanu dihotomiju između vlastitoga autorstva i zapravo "nesuvisloga" mitskog naslijeđa sama je autorica usložnila pristajući uz, kroz 19. stoljeće formuliran, kolektivni identitet slavenskoga naslijeđa, "slavenske duše" koja, u njezinoj interpretaciji geneze vlastite zbirke, isključuje mitski sloj. Zaobilazeći ovu autoričinu eksplicitnu razliku između mitologije i tradicije, dosadašnji su istraživači nastojali precizirati mitološke motive, simbole, likove i autore čiji je utjecaj vidljiv u opusu Ivanu Brlić-Mažuranić. Za razliku od toga, u ovom se članku pokušava razumjeti mjesto autoričine kritike i odmaka od slavenske mitologije. Uzimajući u obzir ne samo narativni i ideološki koncept Priča iz davnine nego i niz autoričinih pisama, članaka i intervjua, razotkriva se prepoznatljiv okvir unutar kojeg Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić daje novo značenje doista brojnim, kako ih naziva, "imenima" iz porušenog mitološkog svijeta. Nasuprot binarizmu i voluntarizmu mitološkoga univerzuma, kao kritiku i korektiv, autorica postavlja referencijalno provjerljiv i etički fundiran svijet svojih priča.

This paper argues that Ginzburg consciously draws on the intelligence of emotions in her writings. In particular, it demonstrates how Ginzburg conceives « Tutti i nostri ieri », her first major novel, as a device that readers can use to exercise their cognitive and emotional abilities. By reading « Tutti i nostri ieri », readers are encouraged to image the moral horizons and stories of other people, and explore the rich phenomenology of their exposure to moral luck. Thanks to its narrative style, « Tutti i nostri ieri » challenges readers, asking them to overcome their empathic identification with characters by monitoring and reflecting on their emotional responses. La vicenda che in seguito si snoda non è sempre puramente triste ma può rivelarsi triste e allegra ; e vi si riflette sí il disordine del mondo ma anche la sua strana luce. (…) Lo sguardo è svagato e attonito perché consapevole che dopo aver radunato un'ampia dose di partico-lari su un fatto, o su una persona, o sui gesti d'una persona o di un gruppo di persone, tutto resterà come prima e cioè senza senso, o meglio il senso di ogni cosa resterà incomprensibile, perduto nel disordine del mondo. Natalia Ginzburg, Sillabario n. 2 (1982) i. Introduzione : l'« intelligenza fisiologica » della letteratura C esare Garboli ha scritto che il punto di vista nella scrittura di Natalia Ginzburg è « femminile, oscuro, viscerale ». 1 Questo giudizio coglie tre aspet-ti centrali della narrativa e della saggistica di Ginzburg ; per non ripetere uno ste-reotipo sulle donne e capire cosa questa scrittrice cercasse di fare, è però impor-tante distinguerli e definirli più chiaramente. È Ginzburg stessa a chiarire che il rapporto fra il punto di vista femminile, quello oscuro e quello viscerale è un fatto contingente e non un dato biologico, perché risulta da « una secolare tradizione di soggezione e di schiavitù » che le donne abbiano « qualcosa di dolente e di pietoso che non c'è negli uomini, un continuo pericolo di cascare in un pozzo oscuro » 1 Cesare Garboli, Prefazione, in Natalia Ginzburg, Opere, i, a raccolte e ordinate dall'autore, pre-fazione di Cesare Garboli, 2 voll., Milano, Mondadori, 1986-1987, pp. ix-xvli : xxv. D'ora in poi indicherò questa edizione con la lettera O seguita dal numero del volume. Come ha notato Scarpa, questo giudizio è stato ripreso da tutta la critica successiva : Domenico Scarpa, Postfazione, in Natalia Ginzburg, Non possiamo saperlo : saggi 1973-1990, a cura di Domenico Scarpa, Torino, Einaudi, 2001, pp. 199-210 : 213.

The article claims that Jonas Lüscher's first novel titled Barbarian Spring follows a twofold program: it is a book with a strong moral and political message, and at the same time it is challenging literature's possibility to incite action. Therefore, the book stands within the tradition of the Enlightenment when it comes to educating the reader, and in a larger sense, believing in the social value of Bildung; yet, it simultaneously shows the limits of the Enlightenment frame by decomposing the linkage between moral knowledge and actual behavior. To pursue this twofold goal, the book intertwines traditional aesthetic forms with modernist goals, and demonstrates in the end the limits of applicability and fertility of both approaches in today's context and when – as the text suggests – consequentialist categories are applied. The text diagnoses the malfunctioning of the syncretism of Capitalism, Christianity, and the Enlightenment not only when it comes to issuing rules for moral behavior, but also when it comes to giving meaning to experience. Following this second possible purpose of literature – sense-making – the book examines literature's therapeutic possibilities, when therapy means the integration in or the creation of a coherent interpretational scheme.

A Passage to India (1924) and Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster depict man in his relation to others. Considering this importance, this article aims to explore these novels via the theoretical framework of ethical criticism focusing on the theory of Emmanuel Levinas. Giving the priority to ethics rather than ontology, the base for the theory of Levinas is the ethical encounter between the self and the other whose face is ethics itself. He claims of demands that the face of the other issues to the self whose response is a must in order to serve the alterity of the other. Reading these
novels through Levinas, it is argued that the issue of justice is complicated in them so that the Levinasian conception of justice regarding the liberty of the self would be problematized when applied to them; and it is the primary objective of this article.

Many philosophers have argued that stories, if they are valuable at all, gain their value through their correspondence to general truths that they encapsulate or exemplify in concrete form. Since philosophers can know these general truths directly, fiction and history are inferior to philosophy. Socrates, as presented by Plato, held such a radical version of this position that he was ready to expel all poets from his ideal state, and replace their books with myths contrived by philosophers. Kant held a generally more complex theory of art, but he nevertheless agreed with Socrates’s view about the relationship of stories to moral philosophy. “Imitation,” he wrote, “finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, i.e., they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands, they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples.” 1 This position harmonizes well with the view, also common among moral philosophers, that moral truth is ultimately a matter of theory. As J. S. Mill put it, “the morality of an individual action is . . . the application of a law to an individual case.” 2 If truths in the moral realm are laws, maxims, or doctrines, then stories can (at best) offer instantiations or illustrations of these doctrines.

Few people would describe the tragedy of King Lear or the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as funny. To the contrary, these works feel weighty, momentous, and serious. In "Sweet Fooling," however, I use recent work on the place of humor in Levinas's ethical thought to examine the role of the Fool in Shakespeare's great tragedy. I demonstrate that the Fool's humor is profoundly ethical, inviting the king to laugh, both at himself (in a self-critical act of abdication) and with others (in a generative opening toward interrelation). The king may or may not accept these invitations, but the Fool relentlessly pushes the play in ethical directions by using humor to place himself before the other in a posture of vulnerability and exposure that Levinas sees as the foundation for all ethics. In this way, I make a case for the fool, the clown, and the comic, emphasizing the ethical importance of theatrical fooling.

La dimension métapoétique de René Char et Henri Michaux n'a jamais manqué de commentateurs ; pourtant, ces trente dernières années ont vu paraître de nouvelles approches, s'intéressant aux valeurs morales forgées par l'écriture poétique, jusqu'à faire de ces poètes des « moralistes ». Une étude de réception révèlera pourtant que le recours au terme de « moraliste » devient endémique dès les années 1950, jusqu'à la fin des années 1960 marquant le « régime de la lettre » sous l'influence du structuralisme, dont les premiers signes d'essoufflement reporteront l'attention des critiques sur le versant éthique de ces poètes. Comment expliquer les variations de ce phénomène critique du point de vue historique ? Du côté des poètes, dès l'après-guerre, l'intérêt pour la question morale est constant. 1945 amorce une remise en question de la « fonction » du poète. L'idée d'une indécence de la poésie a trouvé ses adeptes, mais Michaux et Char sont de ceux qui théorisent une nouvelle légitimation : rompant avec la méfiance envers la morale et la tentation d'un pur autotélisme inaugurées par Baudelaire, Mallarmé et Rimbaud, ces poètes pressentent la nécessité de faire de la poésie une interrogation morale et existentielle constante tout en conservant son intégrité. Moraliste, peut-être, mais pas moralisateur ; point de poésie gnomique, mais une poésie demeurée poésie, accueillant sa réflexivité au sein d'une perspective éthique, pour une meilleure habitation du monde. Dans un temps de procès pour outrage à la morale d'une poésie accusée d'indécence, condamnable au silence ou aux purs travaux d'intérêt esthétique, la position de nos auteurs, réduisant au maximum la part de gratuité de leur poésie, constitue une alternative sous caution ; loin de contredire tout à fait l'idéal autotélique moderne dont elle hérite, cette écriture fusionne questionnement éthique et questionnement poétique. Tandis que la poésie fondée sur une exigence morale devient art de vivre, la « morale », répondant à des exigences poétiques, ne se convertit pas seulement en une éthique mais en une « esthétique de l'existence », sur le modèle des sagesses antiques et orientales, précisément au moment où celle-ci, en tant que code de prescriptions collectives et valeurs consensuelles, dans la seconde moitié du XX è , perd tout crédit.

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

"Cet article vise à expliquer la valeur cognitive de certaines œuvres littéraires grâce au concept d’« éthopée » (mimesis morale, peinture de mœurs). Cette notion d’origine rhétorique peut être élargie pour indiquer un genre transversal qui se situe au point d’intersection idéal entre littérature et connaissance, et qui peut être pratiqué par toutes les « sciences morales » – l’histoire, l’anthropologie, la sociologie, la psychologie, etc. – se rapportant à la réalité humaine par le biais d’une représentation phénoménologique de l’ethos (caractère/ mœurs au double sens individuel et collectif). On présentera donc cette conception de l’éthopée, dont on retracera la fortune à travers quelques jalons marquants de la tradition « moraliste » occidentale, d’Aristote et Théophraste aux romanciers réalistes modernes, en soulignant les continuités et les discontinuités qui ont caractérisé cette tradition, ainsi que les relations entre littérature et sciences humaines.


The aim of the article is to explore the cognitive value of certain literary works through the notion of “ethopoiia” (moral mimesis). Originally a rhetorical notion, “ethopoiia” may be developed into a transversal literary genre, ideally situated at the crossroads between literature and knowledge, which may be practiced by any of the “moral sciences”–history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.–which approach human reality through the phenomenological representation of ethos (character/custom, either individual or collective). Having illustrated the theoretical framework of Ethopoiia, I will discuss the development of this long-standing “moralistic” tradition through a number of significant examples from the Western canon, from Aristotle and Theophrastus down to the realist novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stressing continuities and discontinuities, and focusing on the relationship between literature and the human sciences."

3 «Ora posso dire che l'arte è una sciocchezza. Ma una sciocchezza senza la quale la vita non avrebbe sapore, forse nemmeno senso. La letteratura, come ogni forma di arte, è una sciocchezza, d'accordo, solo che, come disse Pessoa, è la semplice dimostrazione che la vita non basta. E per questo noi continuiamo a parlarne». Tabucchi

Comparisons of Montaigne’s Essays and Shakespeare’s Hamlet tend to focus on Montaigne’s skepticism, as laid out in his longest and best-known essay, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Hamlet’s doubts resemble Montaigne’s, and critics have suggested that his notorious indecisiveness may be modeled on Montaigne's own more philosophical suspense of judgment. Less well-explored, however, is the influence of Montaigne’s Epicureanism, apparent in his embrace of the Epicurean principle, “lathe biōsas” (“live unnoticed”). In order to preserve his equanimity, Montaigne deliberately avoids responsibility, withdrawing into private otium (“idleness”). He shuns social obligations, even to his own family, and tries to avoid any kind of service to the state. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a critique of this aspect of Epicurean ethics, and perhaps even of Montaigne himself, as its advocate.

Der Aufsatz analysiert die rhetorische Strategie, die Manzoni in Storia
della colonna infame anwendet, um den historischen Diskurs in Richtung
einer moralischen Kritik zu entwickeln. Laut Manzonis Literaturtheorie soll
Dichtung die Geschichte erzählen, damit die moralischen Ursachen des
Geschehens erkannt und diskutiert werden können. Trotzdem glaubte Manzoni
auch, dass eine Vermischung von Dichtung und Geschichte gefährlich sei,
da der Leser nicht in der Lage sei, das Wahre vom Wahrscheinlichen zu unterscheiden.
Vom Standpunkt des Rationalismus aus sei solch ein Widerspruch inakzeptabel. Deshalb entschied sich Manzoni, theoretisch die zwei Ebenen
des Darstellens, nämlich Geschichte und Dichtung, zu trennen und den historischen
Roman negativ zu beurteilen. In Storia della colonna infame kann
man sehen, wie Manzoni die Rhetorik des Wahrscheinlichen als Rhetorik der
Vermutung benutzt, wodurch der Schriftsteller den moralischen Gehalt der
Tatsachen erahnen und Geschichte moralisch interpretieren kann.

"I've become aware of a key intellectual trick or error within much, though not all, current theory that works to get students to renounce their faith in their personal capacities -- faith, forexample, in their own intuitions, in their creativity, and in their sense that simply by virtue of being human they carry a precious capacity for autonomous judgments about what is real."