Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-100
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Literary Ethics

Cognitive Media Ethics

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.

Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-100
Author(s):  
Philipp Hunnekuhl
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Literary Ethics ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
The Mind

Chapter three reveals the paradigm shift in Robinson’s theorization of literature that his ‘conversion’ from the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Godwin to Kant’s critical philosophy prompted. Yet Kant’s notion of aesthetic autonomy – of art’s detachment from the motives of the mind and the causality governing the laws of nature – occasioned an impasse in Robinson’s conceptualization of literature’s ethical relevance. He resolved this in an ingenious move by skilfully locating in Kant’s critical philosophy, and then developing, an analogy between art and morals: the self-contained structure and dynamic of a work of literature find their corresponding parameters in the reader’s mind, in her or his moral compass. On the basis of this analogy, chapter three argues, Robinson conducted his own ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of absolute aesthetic autonomy, and developed the ground-breaking critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’ (Hunnekuhl) that from here onwards underpinned his literary activities. Against the backdrop of various unpublished manuscripts, this chapter discusses Robinson’s articles on Hume and causality, and on Moses Mendelssohn and the Pantheism Controversy, in the Monthly Magazine (1799–1801), as well as his letters ‘On the Philosophy of Kant’ in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03).

Literary Ethics

2012 ◽  
pp. 243-247
Author(s):  
Heinz Antor
Keyword(s):  
Literary Ethics

J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and the poetics of resistance

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Eckard Smuts
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
European Modernism

Since the beginning of his career, J. M. Coetzee’s writing has occupied an uneasy threshold between the literary ideals of European modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the demands of socio-historical accountability that derives from his background as a South African novelist. This article revisits one of Coetzee’s novels in which these tensions come to the fore most explicitly, namely Age of Iron, to argue that it is precisely from the generative friction that arises between these two opposing fields that his writing draws its singularly affective force. I begin by considering the agonistic relationship between transcendent ideals and socio-material demands that marks Coetzee’s account of the classic (“What is a Classic?: A Lecture”), describing it as a defining feature of his literary sensibility. The article then moves on to a reading of Age of Iron that focuses on the protagonist Mrs Curren’s efforts, in the midst of the violent political struggle in apartheid South Africa, to speak in her own voice. My thoughts conclude with the suggestion that Coetzee’s perennial staging of the conflict between a desire for autonomous expression and a socio-historical milieu that is indifferent to that desire can be read as an imaginative form of resistance, in the field of literary expression, to both the pressures of historical determinism and the dangers of postmodern insularity.

Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Love
Keyword(s):  
Literary Ethics

scholarly journals On the Ethics of Interpretation: are Young Readers to Blame?

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 264
Author(s):  
Indrė Žakevičienė
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Literary Ethics ◽  
Mental Spaces

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.

scholarly journals Critique. Division. An Archaeology of Separation and a Salvaging Etymology

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Trzeciak ◽  
Jakob Ziguras
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Widespread Interest

The goal of this essay is twofold: firstly, it is a description a post-critical tendency within the contemporary, Anglo-American humanities; secondly, it presents propositions which broaden the boundaries current in the post-critical current, which lead to the replacement of critical sci-entificity with an affirmation of everyday readerly affects. The claims regarding the rejection of a criticism based on suspicion, formulated by, among others, Rita Felski, accentuate the elite character of reading, the goal of which is the unveiling of the economico- political entan-glement of the text as a product of historical reality. The distrust towards the surface of the text and the illusion of aesthetic autonomy, central for cultural studies, raised the critical atti-tude to the rank of an activity that is revelatory and privileged. The opponents of an unmask-ing criticism underline its limitations—unmasking reveals the ultimate source of every cultural production, the logic of capitalism, the total character of which leaves no chance for change. In defense of change, and in the hope of restoring to literature a widespread interest, there appear tendencies which bring back the individual experience of reading, the basis of which is to be aesthetic pleasure, freed from the historical context and its determinants. In the article, examples of such tendencies will be pointed out, as also will be their consequences caused by the elevation and universalisation of non-professional reading. The rejection of the political task of criticism leads to the questioning of its anti-systemic potential; in turn, the apotheosis of suspicion paralyses the postulative dimension of criticism. For this reason, in the last part of the essay, I propose going beyond oppositional con ceptualisations in the direction of a criti-cism that is situated and material, and whose model, in my rendering, is subordi nated knowledge.

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