Transcript Literary Theory and Methodology

Literary Theory and
Methodology
Session Five: The Ethics of
Reading
Agenda
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Appetizer: Oscar Wilde, ”Preface”
What is ethics?
Ethical criticism and narrative
Ethical reading: from liberal humanism to
structuralism and poststructuralism
• Examples
Appetizer: Oscar Wilde, ”Preface”
• John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold:
literature as saviour
• Oscar Wilde and aesthticism or art for art’s
sake
What is ethics?
• Ethics = moral philosophy
• Universalism, relativism, pluralism
– Good / bad
– Right / wrong
– Virtuous / sinful
Ethical criticism and narrative
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Why narrative?
Story / plot: patterns of cause and effect
Character / characterization: motivation
Point of view: comments, judgements,
evaluation.
• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
→ The Company We Keep: An Ethics of
Fiction (1988)
Ethical criticism
• Liberal humanism
• The author (and the text)
– Complex experience of life
– Moral intensity, moral intelligence
– Spiritual health
Ethical criticism
• The tradition of liberal humanism
(universalism)
– Characters = real human beings
– Motivations, actions, consequences
– Thought and speech: inner and outer
– Evaluations and discussion
Ethics of reading / ethical criticism
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Feminism
Postcolonialist theory
Gay, lesbian and queer theory
Green reading / ecocriticism
Poststructuralism and deconstruction
– The openness of the text
– The signifier rather than the signified
The ethics of reading / ethical
criticism
• Formalism and aestheticism
• Structuralism:
– Sign systems rather than authors
– Characterization rather than character
• The new criticism: the poem as an object
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus
• The title
• The epigraph
• The frame structure
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus
• The dangers of excessive ambition
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
John Milton, Paradise Lost
James Joyce, ”The Dead”
• How does Gabriel go wrong in imagining
an identity for Gretta?
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the
Body
• ”It’s the clichés that cause all the trouble”
• The narrator-protagonist’s invention of
Louise
• Louise’s invention of herself
Nadine Gordimer, ”The Moment
Before the Gun Went Off”