Literature and Ethics

The course begins by defining the concepts literature, ethics and morality. Further on, the course focuses on the historical survey of the theoretical musings on the relationship between ethics and literature and the presence of the ethical dimension in literary works from the Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism to the ethical turn in the literary science at the end of the 20th century. The majority of the course is dedicated to the contemporary thematizations of the ethical in literature by central theoreticians of the ethical literary science (Wayne C. Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, Gayatri C. Spivak, Nie Zhenzhao, James Phelan, etc.). The course also deals with philosophical ethics that shaped these theories (Aristotle, Kant, Derrida, Levinas). Various theoretical solutions are illustrated with literary examples.