Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory

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by Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published February 1999, 260 pages, paper

ISBN 0521629381

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer coherent accounts of ethics in a fragmented social and intellectual world? In this collection, some of your favorite philosophers and literary scholars address the renewed interest in the literary text as a focus for ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum--a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory.

Contributors: David Parker, Simon Haines, Cora Diamond, Lisabeth During, Jane Adamson, Charles Altieri, Richard Freadman, Paul John Eakin, John Wiltshire, C.A.J. Coady, Seamus Miller, Martha C. Nussbaum, Annette C. Baier, Raimond Gaita

Table of Contents

Introduction: the turn to ethics in the 1990s--David Parker

Part I. Ethics, Literature and Philosophy
Deepening the self: the language of ethics and the language of literature--Simon Haines
Martha Nussbaum and the need for novels--Cora Diamond
The concept of dread: sympathy and ethics in Daniel Deronda--Lisabeth During
Against tidiness: literature and/versus moral philosophy: a response to Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Iris Murdoch--Jane Adamson

Part II. Ethics and Agency
What differences can contemporary poetry make in our moral thinking?--Charles Altieri
Moral luck in Paris: A Moveable Feast and the ethics of autobiography--Richard Freadman
The unseemly profession: privacy, inviolate personality, and the ethics of life writing--Paul John Eakin
The patient writes back: bioethics and the pathography--John Wiltshire

Part III. Politics and Ethics
Literature, power and the recovery of philosophical ethics--C. A. J. Coady and Seamus Miller
The literary imagination in public life--Martha C. Nussbaum
Ethics in many different voices--Annette C. Baier
Common understanding and individual voices--Raimond Gaita

Series: Literature, Culture, Theory