Cynthia R. Wallace, Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering

The author of the article will discuss the problem of validity thinking about the basic statements of Literary Ethics. Though the problems Literary Ethics emphasizes are global and at the same time rather abstract, the efforts of literary researchers to educate readers with the help of novels are understandable but seem ineffectual. Young readers are not capable of understanding complicated texts of the previous century because of the different contents of their mental spaces or the different schemes of thinking. Literary Ethics speaks about the importance of the role of emotions while reading novels, but the spectrum of primary emotions young readers experience while reading complicated literary texts blocks all the ways to deeper understanding and the ability to analyze specific ethical issues encoded in the novels. The theory of emotions explains the situation and in a way rehabilitates young readers. Nevertheless, particular transformations of genres or of the original form of literary texts could evoke the readers’ interest and make them think deeper or extend the realm of interpretations by relating particular “genre markers” and rethinking their codes.

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Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

THE SVETLANA BOYM READER ◽

10.5040/9781501337536.0020 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

Umberto Eco ◽

Conspiracy Theories ◽

Literary Ethics ◽

Danilo Kis

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Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship

10.1017/9781108993517.006 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 199-245

Keyword(s):

Literary Ethics

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Cognitive Media Ethics

Cognitive Film and Media Ethics ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197552889.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 13-39

Author(s):

Wyatt Moss-Wellington

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Science ◽

Media Studies ◽

Normative Ethics ◽

Media Ethics ◽

Aesthetic Autonomy ◽

Literary Ethics

This chapter surveys a breadth of approaches to the ethics of film and other narrative media, both contemporary and historic, and positions them in relation to developments in cognitive media ethics. These include cine-ethics and film philosophy, phenomenological approaches, literary ethics and hermeneutics, notions of aesthetic autonomy, and ethics in narratology. The contributions and challenges of each approach are summarized, as are their uses in the development of a normative ethics for cognitive media studies. Throughout this chapter, a case emerges for the complementary, elaborative rigors of cognitive science, normative ethics, and consequentialism. The chapter concludes by indicating how methods for analysis developed at the center of these areas of study will inform the remainder of the book.

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“Literary Ethics” (1838)

Emerson and Thoreau ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511666650.006 ◽

1992 ◽

pp. 55-76

Keyword(s):

Literary Ethics

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Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h8040164 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 164

Author(s):

Cynthia R. Wallace

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Indigenous Women ◽

The Novel ◽

Careful Attention ◽

Face To Face ◽

Ethics Of Reading ◽

Sexualized Violence ◽

Literary Ethics ◽

Classroom Conversations ◽

Women And Girls

Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy. This essay advocates instead for an approach that sees literary representation and readerly attention as interanimating and that considers teaching an important aspect of an ethics of reading. To support these positions, I turn to Katherena Vermette’s 2016 novel The Break, which both represents the urgent injustice of sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls and also metafictionally comments on the ethics of witnessing. Describing how I read with my students the novel’s insistent thematization of face-to-face encounters and practices of attention as an invitation to read with Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, I explicate the text’s self-aware commentary on both the need for readers to resist self-enlargement in their encounters with others’ stories and also the danger of generalizing readerly responsibility or losing sight of the material realities the text represents. I source these challenges both in the novel and in my students’ multiple particularities as readers facing the textual other. Ultimately, the essay argues for a more careful attention to which works we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics, and which theoretical frames we bring into classroom conversations.

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