Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions

Description

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the ethical value of literature. However, how exactly does literature contribute to our ethical understanding? In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher argues that literary scholars should locate this question in the long and various history of moral philosophy. On the basis of his own reading of this history, Asher contends for the centrality of emotions in our ethical lives and shows how literature - novels, poetry, and drama - can each contribute to crucial emotional understanding. Individual chapters on T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw give detailed analyses of how this contribution takes shape even in modernist authors who try to reconfigure the very nature of the self.

Kenneth Asher holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently he is Professor of English and Philosophy at the State University of New York, Geneseo where he serves as Chairman of the Humanities Committee. He has also taught at Stanford University, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge, 1995).

'Asher (SUNY, Geneseo) offers a nuanced exploration of the ethical function of emotions as rendered through selected works of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw. ... Asher argues that literature deepens readers' ethical awareness through intelligence of characters' affective lives. ... Asher provocatively argues against literature as essentially a repository of normative scenarios and for its complex portrayal of relationships facilitating a deeper moral cognizance. ... Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' C. Baker, CHOICE '... Asher's work will be of interest to a wider field of scholars concerned with the question of how reading and an attentiveness to emotions allows us to know the ethical life.' Vivek Santayana, BSLS Reviews