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400 - Honors: Ethics and the Novel (L)
Professor Daniel Hack
TTh 12:30 - 1:50
Novels typically feature characters confronting basic ethical questions--what ought I to do? what should I value? how should I live?--and many novels seek to shape their readers' own answers to these questions. In this course, we'll examine the novel's historical preoccupations with the ethical and its project of moral education. We will not ask such questions as "is Character Y a good person?" or "did Character X do the right thing?", let alone ponder what we would do in a similar situation. Instead, we will focus on the formal means by which novels promote or undercut particular ethical stances and practices. The kinds of questions we'll ask include: Does readerly identification with fictional characters promote benevolence? Does omniscient narration train us to transcend our particular interests? Does narrative encourage us to judge actions by their consequences rather than their motives? Does realism promote a specifically "female" style of ethical thinking? We'll also consider the political implications of a focus on the ethical, and we'll ask where novels stand in relation to the demystification of ethics one finds in, say, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
We'll proceed by reading two Victorian novelists who emphasize the ethical content and stakes of fiction (Charles Dickens, Bleak House, and George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss) and two later novelists who react against these predecessors (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse); time permitting, we'll finish with an intriguing contemporary novel, Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. We'll also read a number of short pieces on ethics, the history of ethics, and ethics and literature.
Requirements: The course assumes no prior knowledge of ethical theory. You don't even need to be a particularly good person, so long as you are willing to accept the following responsibilities: keeping up with a fairly heavy reading load, coming to class ready to participate actively in class discussion, and completing all writing assignments (two six-page papers, a 10-15 page paper, and occasional, informal response papers). Also, please read Dickens's A Christmas Carol for the first class.
Registration through the Undergraduate English Office, 303 Clemens Hall.
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