- CC 325 BX - Narrative Ethics
- 3 or 4 Credits
MWF 12:55-1:45pm - Professor Johnson
(Cross-listed with ENGL 390 AX & ENGL 590 AX)
What responsibilities do authors have to their works? What responsibilities do readers have to the works they read? Why? This course will explore the ethical relationships between author, reader, and text as understood by various Western philosophers, literary critics, poets, fiction writers, and filmmakers from 1798 to the present. While we will pay attention to the ethical content of the creative works—stories about ethics—our concern will be with how both creative and philosophical texts present the acts of writing and reading as ethical acts.
Underlying these questions about responsibility, then, will be larger questions about interpretation and the relation of language to truth. Through our common experience with poetry, fiction, and film, we will discuss to what extent narrative ethics informs our own acts of interpretation and how such interpretive work clarifies or shapes our selves in relation to others.
Assignments will include short critical analyses, two essays, and participation and leadership in class discussion.
Course texts may include the following:
- Eliot, George, The Lifted Veil
- Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory
- McEwan, Ian, Atonement
- Morrison, Toni, Love
Coursepack: poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Hemans, and Dickinson; short fiction by Kipling, James, and Woolf; and nonfiction prose selections from Wordsworth, Shelley, Schleiermacher, George Eliot, Woolf, Ingarden, Ricoeur, Levinas, and Miller
Films: The Purple Rose of Cairo, Run Lola Run, and Stranger than Fiction