“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent i

Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

Cognitive Media 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

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).

Human’s Experience at Turning-point in Vytautas Martinkus’s Novel “Simonija”: the Aspect of Literary Ethics

The author of the thesis uses Literary Ethics as a theoretical instrument and analyses the portrait of human dealing with turning-point in Vytautas Martinkus’s novel Simonija. The novel corresponds to the features of the turning-point literature marked in the dissertation of V. Katinienė: the thematic level emphasizes a change of historical (political) order and its existential problems; in thoughts, dreams, memories characters go back to the period of totalitarianism; the contrast between “homo sovieticus” and individuals of the free world is emphasized. The analysis of ethical conflicts in Simonija is presented, having in mind specific cultural context during the Soviet period and emphasizing the process of writing as a particular ethical situation and a way to reflect human’s experience. Vytautas Martinkus offers appropriate “snoumenizm” notion for summarizing human’s experience during the Soviet periodperiod. In essence, dehumanizing, painful experience of the Soviet era does not abandon human even in the period of freedom and forces him to go back to the past – physical presence in the world of restored independence does not free him from inner stagnation. In this paper, it is shown that Literary Ethics is asuitable theoretical instrument in order to analyze text about human’s experience at turning-point.