The occupation with ethics is probably as old as philosophy itself, and the debate around the ethics of literature has a similarly long history. There were those like Plato who criticised fiction for being essentially a lie, useless, or, worse, immoral. Against this accusation a longstanding line of defence of the literary argues that fiction has the double function of providing entertainment and being useful—and that one of the uses is specifically setting an example of the good life, of how to live ethically. In the more recent history of literary theory, ethics was relegated to the sidelines of the theoretical debate during much of the 1960s and 70s. It is only since the “ethical turn” of the 1980s that the study of literature and ethics has become prominent in the critical debate again. In this course we will look at different theories from this recent period on how (or whether at all) fiction may be ethical.
The aim of the course is to make students familiar with various theoretical approaches to ethics, and to practice reading such theoretical/philosophical texts, as well as, in a second step, to make them fruitful for reading literature. We will read some of the most prominent recent theories on ethics and/in fiction and discuss and compare those different approaches. The major approaches we will focus on are Martha Nussbaum’s Neo-Aristotelian ethics that, broadly speaking, seeks examples of the good life in literature, J. Hillis Miller’s poststructuralist, text-centred “ethics of reading” and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of radical alterity that has informed the critical debate around an “ethics of deconstruction”. In particular, the latter two approaches ask whether a text can be ethical not just at the level of its contents but also via its formal structure.
We will then also apply these approaches to one novel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and a number of shorter texts to see how the different theoretical approaches to ethics may shape the reading of such texts.
Students must obtain their own copy of McEwan’s Saturday (see "Literaturhinweise" above). The other texts will be made available in a reader.
Anmelderegeln
Diese Veranstaltung gehört zum Anmeldeset "Anmeldeverfahren ELW/ALW/NELK: MA/LA Aufbaumodul (Übungen)".
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Es wird eine festgelegte Anzahl von Plätzen in den Veranstaltungen verteilt.
Die Plätze in den betreffenden Veranstaltungen wurden am 08.04.2019 um 12:00 verteilt. Weitere Plätze werden evtl. über Wartelisten zur Verfügung gestellt.
Die Anmeldung ist möglich von 25.03.2019, 18:00 bis 05.04.2019, 18:00.
Diese Regel gilt von 25.03.2019 18:00 bis 05.04.2019 18:00. Die Anmeldung zu maximal 2 Veranstaltungen des Anmeldesets ist erlaubt.
