Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction PDF Author: Leona Toker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814252550
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Scholars and critics have long recognized the need for ethical criticism to address not only the idea-content but also the morphological aspects of narrative, yet the search continues for ways to study the ethics of narrative form. In Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission, Leona Toker suggests a method of linking formal features of narratives with the types of moral vision that they represent.Toker is especially interested in cultural remissions such as the carnivalesque-that is, the inverting of standard cultural hierarchies or the blurring of boundaries between normally separated social groups, actors and audiences, self and other. She argues that cultural remissions have the potential not simply to provide a break from the determinacies of our quotidian existence but also to return us to that existence with some alteration of our perceptions, beliefs, and values. Toker contends that the ethical consequences of reading fiction result from features of its aesthetics, particularly what she calls, following the semiotician Louis Hjemslev, "the form of the content"-the patterns arising from the artistic deployment of narrative details. In addition to addressing the carnivalesque discourse of Bakhtin as well as the theory of oppositionality developed by de Certeau and Chambers, she puts theory into practice through detailed analyses of canonical texts by Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Hawthorne, Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, and other writers.

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction PDF Author: Leona Toker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814252550
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
Scholars and critics have long recognized the need for ethical criticism to address not only the idea-content but also the morphological aspects of narrative, yet the search continues for ways to study the ethics of narrative form. In Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission, Leona Toker suggests a method of linking formal features of narratives with the types of moral vision that they represent.Toker is especially interested in cultural remissions such as the carnivalesque-that is, the inverting of standard cultural hierarchies or the blurring of boundaries between normally separated social groups, actors and audiences, self and other. She argues that cultural remissions have the potential not simply to provide a break from the determinacies of our quotidian existence but also to return us to that existence with some alteration of our perceptions, beliefs, and values. Toker contends that the ethical consequences of reading fiction result from features of its aesthetics, particularly what she calls, following the semiotician Louis Hjemslev, "the form of the content"-the patterns arising from the artistic deployment of narrative details. In addition to addressing the carnivalesque discourse of Bakhtin as well as the theory of oppositionality developed by de Certeau and Chambers, she puts theory into practice through detailed analyses of canonical texts by Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Hawthorne, Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, and other writers.

Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature

Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature PDF Author: Lykke Guanio-Uluru
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137469692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru examines formal and ethical aspects of The Lord of the Rings , Harry Potter and the Twilight series in order to discover what best-selling fantasy texts can tell us about the values of contemporary Western culture.

Borrowed Forms

Borrowed Forms PDF Author: Kathryn Lachman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781380309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
A pioneering, interdisciplinary study of how transnational novelists and critics use music as a critical device to structure narrative and to model ethical relations.

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form PDF Author: Greta Matzner-Gore
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810141971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination

Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination PDF Author: Russell Blackford
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319616854
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this highly original book, Russell Blackford discusses the intersection of science fiction and humanity’s moral imagination. With the rise of science and technology in the 19th century, and our continually improving understanding of the cosmos, writers and thinkers soon began to imagine futures greatly different from the present. Science fiction was born out of the realization that future technoscientific advances could dramatically change the world. Along with the developments described in modern science fiction - space societies, conscious machines, and upgraded human bodies, to name but a few - come a new set of ethical challenges and new forms of ethics. Blackford identifies these issues and their reflection in science fiction. His fascinating book will appeal to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science fiction, or in how they interact. “This is a seasoned, balanced analysis of a major issue in our thinking about the future, seen through the lens of science fiction, a central art of our time. Everyone from humanists to technologists should study these ideas and examples. Blackford’s book is wise and savvy, and a delight to read as well.” Greg Benford, author of Timescape.

The Novel and the New Ethics

The Novel and the New Ethics PDF Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

Of Women Borne

Of Women Borne PDF Author: Cynthia R. Wallace
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541201
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
The literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie teaches a risky, self-giving way of reading (and being) that brings home the dangers and the possibilities of suffering as an ethical good. Working the thought of feminist theologians and philosophers into an analysis of these women's writings, Cynthia R. Wallace crafts a literary ethics attentive to the paradoxes of critique and re-vision, universality and particularity, and reads in suffering a redemptive or redeemable reality. Wallace's approach recognizes the generative interplay between ethical form and content in literature, which helps isolate more distinctly the gendered and religious echoes of suffering and sacrifice in Western culture. By refracting these resonances through the work of feminists and theologians of color, her book also shows the value of broad-ranging ethical explorations into literature, with their power to redefine theories of reading and the nature of our responsibility to art and each other.

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction PDF Author: Jean Mills
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814271339
Category : Ethics in literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Camus' Literary Ethics

Camus' Literary Ethics PDF Author: Grace Whistler
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030377563
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book seeks to establish the relevance of Albert Camus’ philosophy and literature to contemporary ethics. By examining Camus’ innovative methods of approaching moral problems, Whistler demonstrates that Camus’ work has much to offer the world of ethics— Camus does philosophy differently, and the insights his methodologies offer could prove invaluable in both ethical theory and practice. Camus sees lived experience and emotion as ineliminable in ethics, and thus he chooses literary methods of communicating moral problems in an attempt to draw positively on these aspects of human morality. Using case studies of Camus’ specific literary methods, including dialogue, myth, mime and syntax, Whistler pinpoints the efficacy of each of Camus’ attempts to flesh-out moral problems, and thus shows just how much contemporary ethics could benefit from such a diversification in method.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Matthew Sussman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108832946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Offers a deep history of style in theory and practice that transforms our understanding of style in the novel.