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Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
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Geoffry G. Harpham
Published/Copyright:
February 24, 2011
Abstract
Despite a consensus that literature has some positive relation to ethics, the precise nature of this relationship remains mysterious. This paper attempts to explain both the connection and the inability to specify it by positing that the ethical productivity of literature is necessarily indirect or coded; that is, we gain ethical knowledge from literature only when we do not know what, or even that, we are learning. The paper considers three ways in which literature can be ethically instructive: literary form, which accustoms us to ways of thinking that defy logical reduction but are essential to ethics; literary language, which awakens us to the morally pertinent fact that expression does not always conform to intention or register reality; and the literary representation of communal life, which reveals the limitations of the subject's moral autonomy and the philosophical theories based on that autonomy.
Published Online: 2011-02-24
Published in Print: 2010-December
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Articles in the same Issue
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
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- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
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- The Old English Boethius. An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine with a chapter on the Metres by Mark Griffith and contributions by Rohini Jayatilaka
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- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
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- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
- Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, ed. Ingo Irsigler & Christoph Jürgensen; 9/11 als kulturelle Zäsur: Repräsentationen des 11. September 2001 in kulturellen Diskursen, Literatur und visuellen Medien, ed. Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller & Sascha Seiler
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