Ethics in Culture

The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media

Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9783110200720
• eBook ISBN: 9783110206555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics.
This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values
• Being Ethical: Open, Less Open, and Hidden Dissemination of Values in English Literature
• Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics
• Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values:The Holiday of Language
• Beyond Virtue and Duty: Literary Ethics as Answerability
• An Ethical Narratology
• What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering
• “Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature
• Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved
• Can Literary Figures Serve as Ethical Models?
• The Ethical Dimension of Cognitive Poetics and “A Mechanism of Sensibility”
• Ethics in Stone: The Architecture of the Raj
• The Dissemination of Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Literature and Other Media
• Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature
• Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical
• Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Literature and Theory: A Paradoxical Alliance?
• Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American War II Novel
• The Nightmare of History, the Value of Art and the Ethics of Love in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
• Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
• Backmatter