Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Ethics and Literature

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Abstract

This chapter discusses a range of approaches to the intersections of literature and ethics. After a brief historical perspective on debates waged in relation to literature and ethics, a number of approaches are presented that are characteristic of the ethical turn: criticism inspired by the neo-Aristotelian humanist tradition in moral philosophy, rhetorical criticism, poststructuralist and deconstructive criticism, social and cultural criticism, and criticism rooted in philosophical hermeneutics. The chapter then sketches a number of sociological, cognitive, and psychological approaches that seek to support or qualify claims about literature’s ethical potential or position these within broader negotiations of value in culture. The concluding remarks address among others the value-laden nature of the discussed approaches and the need for interdisciplinary research in this area.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 299.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 379.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    For clarity’s sake, we will distinguish between morality/moral and ethics/ethical, a common though not systematic distinction in everyday and scholarly language use: we take moral/morality to refer to prescriptive ideas about right and wrong, based on—usually—collectively shared principles of conduct, norms, and values that are expected to underlie individual choice and responsibility in concrete situations; ethical/ethics is understood as referring to critical reflection upon moral issues.

  2. 2.

    This notion was coined by the Austrian writer, a master of ambivalence and ethical reflection, Robert Musil (1978, 1351).

References

  • Althusser, Louis. 2001 (1970). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. Louis Althusser, et al., 85–126. New York, NY: NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qgh9v/.

  • Amossy, Ruth. 2001. Ethos at the Crossroads of Disciplines: Rhetoric, Pragmatics, Sociology. Poetics Today 22 (1): 1–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aristotle. 1987. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translated and Commentary by Stephen Halliwell. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baroni, Raphaël. 2009. L’Oeuvre du temps: Poétique de la discordance narrative. Paris: Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bénichou, Paul. 1973. Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750–1830: essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne. Paris: José Corti.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 1991. De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard.

    Google Scholar 

  • Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996 [1992]. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowie, Andrew. 1997. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brah, Avtar, and Ann Phoenix. 2004. Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality. Journal of International Women’s Studies 5 (3): 75–86.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics. Storyworlds 6 (2): 1–27.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York, NY: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York, NY: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caracciolo, Marco, and Thom van Duuren. 2015. Changed by Literature? A Critical Review of Psychological Research on the Effects of Reading Fiction. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17 (4): 517–539.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Charon, Rita, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colsn, Danielle Spencer, and Maura Spiegel. 2016. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Force de loi: Le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité’. Paris: Éditions Galilée.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorleijn, G.J., R. Grüttemeier, and E.J. Korthals Altes. 2007. The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000). A Critical Assessment. XXXII ed. Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, MA: Peeters.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth. Poetics Today 25 (4): 595–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Felski, Rita. 2008. The Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell–Wiley.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Gesammelte Werke. Band 1: Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gautier, Théophile. 2005. Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Translated by Helen Constantine. London: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Andrew. 1999. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldstein, Thalia R., and Ellen Winner. 2012. Enhancing Empathy and Theory of Mind. Journal of Cognition and Development 13 (1): 19–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gotlib, Anna. 2015. Feminist Ethics and Narrative Ethics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-e-n/.

  • Hakemulder, Frank. 2000. The Moral Laboratory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hämäläinen, Nora. 2016. Literature and Moral Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johansen, J. Dines. 2002. Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Barbara. 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Mark. 1993. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. 2013. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Science 342 (6156): 377–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2017. Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity With Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11 (4): 474–486.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Koopman, Eva Maria. 2016. Effects of ‘Literariness’ on Emotions and on Empathy and Reflection after Reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (1): 82–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2005. Ethical Turn. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman et al., 142–146. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006. Some Dilemmas of an Ethics of Literature. In Theology and Literature: Rethinking Reader Responsibility, ed. G. Ortiz and C. Joseph, 15–31. New York, NY and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lindemann Nelson, Hilde. 2001. Damaged Identities: Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindemann, Hilde. 2014. Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • van Lissa, Caspar J., Marco Caracciolo, et al. 2016. Difficult Empathy. The Effect of Narrative Perspective on Readers’ Engagement with a First-Person Narrator. DIEGESIS 5 (1): 517–539.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macherey, Pierre. 2006 (1966). A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall; Rev. ed. with a new intro. Terry Eagleton and new afterword by the author. London [etc.]: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maingueneau, Dominique. 2004. Le Discours littéraire: Paratopie et scène d’énonciation. Paris: Armand Colin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan B. Peterson. 2006. Bookworms Versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (5): 694–712.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meizoz, Jérôme. 2007. Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur: essai. Geneva: Slatkine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics. New Literary History 45 (1): 89–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature. In Values of Literature, ed. Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 25–46. Leiden: Rodopi Brill.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meretoja, Hanna, and Pirjo Lyytikäinen. 2015. The Plural Values of Literature. In Values of Literature, ed. Hanna Meretoja, Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, and Kristina Malmio, 1–24. Leiden: Rodopi Brill.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Musil, Robert. 1978. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978 [1930/32]. Gesammelte Werke VIII: 1351.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nussbaum, Martha. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1995. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oatley, Keith. 2011. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Phelan, James. 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Narrative Ethics. Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics.

  • Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2013. Twain, Huck, Jim, and Us: The Ethics of Progression in Huckleberry Finn. In Narrative Ethics, ed. Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, 153–166. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plato. 1992/n.d. Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1 (1983). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1988. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3 (1985). Translated by Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1992. Oneself as Another (1990). Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1999. Memory and Forgetting. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 5–11. London and New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rigney, Ann. 2012. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine. Profession. https://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/05/02/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israelpalestine/.

  • Sapiro, Gisèle. 2011. La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France, XIX-XXIème siècle. Paris: Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shklovsky, Viktor. 1991. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sklar, Howard. 2013. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction. Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Todorov, Tzvetan. 2007. La littérature en péril. Paris: Flammarion.

    Google Scholar 

  • Viala, Alain. 1985. Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique. Paris: Minuit.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilde, Oscar. 2000. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Fourth Estate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zima, Peter V. 1985. Manuel de sociocritique. Paris: Picard.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Liesbeth Korthals Altes

  2. University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Hanna Meretoja

Authors
  1. Liesbeth Korthals Altes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hanna Meretoja
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liesbeth Korthals Altes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Barry Stocker

  2. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Michael Mack

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Korthals Altes, L., Meretoja, H. (2018). Ethics and Literature. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_28

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation