Literary Theory and Methodology

Session Five: The Ethics of Reading

Agenda

• Appetizer: Oscar Wilde, ”Preface”

• What is ethics?

• Ethical criticism and narrative

• Ethical reading: from liberal humanism to structuralism and poststructuralism

• Examples

Appetizer: Oscar Wilde, ”Preface”

• John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold: literature as saviour

• Oscar Wilde and aesthticism or art for art’s sake

What is ethics?

• Ethics = moral philosophy

• Universalism, relativism, pluralism– Good / bad– Right / wrong– Virtuous / sinful

Ethical criticism and narrative

• Why narrative?

• Story / plot: patterns of cause and effect

• Character / characterization: motivation

• Point of view: comments, judgements, evaluation.

• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction → The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988)

Ethical criticism

• Liberal humanism

• The author (and the text)– Complex experience of life– Moral intensity, moral intelligence– Spiritual health

Ethical criticism

• The tradition of liberal humanism (universalism)– Characters = real human beings– Motivations, actions, consequences– Thought and speech: inner and outer– Evaluations and discussion

Ethics of reading / ethical criticism

• Feminism

• Postcolonialist theory

• Gay, lesbian and queer theory

• Green reading / ecocriticism

• Poststructuralism and deconstruction– The openness of the text– The signifier rather than the signified

The ethics of reading / ethical criticism

• Formalism and aestheticism

• Structuralism:– Sign systems rather than authors– Characterization rather than character

• The new criticism: the poem as an object

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern

Prometheus

• The title

• The epigraph

• The frame structure

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern

Prometheus

• The dangers of excessive ambition

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me man? Did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?

John Milton, Paradise Lost

James Joyce, ”The Dead”

• How does Gabriel go wrong in imagining an identity for Gretta?

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

• ”It’s the clichés that cause all the trouble”

• The narrator-protagonist’s invention of Louise

• Louise’s invention of herself

Nadine Gordimer, ”The Moment Before the Gun Went Off”