Repository | Book | Chapter

What can an ethical approach to literature mean, and how does it relate to the autonomy art and literature have achieved through the nineteenth and twentieth century? The current "ethical turn" goes from fairly straightforward moralism (literature has to represent certain values and attitudes as desirable), through clarificationism ( literature, in representing conflicting views on human affairs, triggers a critical reflection on, and a weighing of, values), to an ethics of/in literature as a radical deconstruction of morality itself. This essay discusses mainly two approaches: relying on an Aristotelian notion of ethics, Martha Nussbaum defends the moral function of literature, which not only fosters flexibility and pluralism but also positively teaches "how to live the good life"; quite differently, on the basis of a poststructuralist bricolage combining Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and feminist ethics, Andrew Gibson reads literature precisely for the ethical experience of radical undecidability it offers. However deep the differences, both approaches run the risk of reducing literature to a preset idea about what ethics actually is: by locating literature's ethical dimension either (exclusively) in the familiarization of the strange and clear moral guidance, or (as exclusively) in the experience of strangeness, of absence of meaning, and the evanescence of the self.

DOI: 10.1057/9781403982995_2

Full citation: