ENGL 116(F,S) The Ethics of Fiction (W)
Can made up stories actually be bad for you? (Plato seems to have thought so.)
Conversely, can they do you any good, even transform your vision of what it
means to be good? Can reading fiction, that is, shape your moral character? Or is
literature really just entertainment, however sophisticated and intellectually
challenging? In this course, we will explore questions like these about the ethics
of fiction, questions that have inspired some practitioners of the art to make
claims such as: "Surely one of the novel's habitual aims is to articulate morality,
to sharpen the reader's sense of vice and virtue" (John Updike); "You write in
order to change the world...and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a
person looks at reality, then you can change it" (James Baldwin); "...a writer [is]
as an architect of the soul" (Doris Lessing); "Naturally you're aware that bad art
can finally cripple a man" (Saul Bellow). If you are curious about the subject of
ethics, enjoy reading narrative fictions, and are interested in thinking about the
connection between the two, this may be the class for you. We will read a varied
selection of fiction along with a fair amount of scholarship on the links between
moral philosophy and narrative forms in order to refine the critical language we
have at our disposal. Writers we will likely read are: James Baldwin, Wayne
Booth, J.M. Coetzee, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Henry James, Doris
Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Tim O'Brien, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active class participation and five
papers totaling 20 pages.
No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). Preference given to
first-year students.