Philosophy, Ethics and the Uses of Literature Ffi250
Nora Hämäläinen
Tue 10-12 30.10.-11.12.2012, U40 room 12 &
Fri 10-12 2.11.-14.12.2012, U40 room 12.
1. Tue 30.10 Introduction – Literature in/as moral philosophy
2. Fri 2.11
Martha Nussbaum – Literature, politics and neo-Aristotelian ethics
3. Tue 6.11 Cora Diamond – Ethics and literature after Wittgenstein
4. Fri 9.11
Iris Murdoch – The realistic portrayal of human life
5. Tue 13.11 Critics of the literary turn – Posner, Vogler, Landy, O’Neill.
6. Fri 16.11 Literature and moral personhood 1. – Robert Pippin and moral change
7. Tue 20.11 Literature and moral personhood 2. – Stanley Cavell’s perfectionist project
8. Fri 23.11 What is ethics? – Conceptions of ethics and morality in philosophy and literary
criticism.
9. Tue 27.11 What is literature? – Uses of literature and the integrity of art.
10. Fri 30.11 A case study: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (We will discuss the novel!)
11. Tue 4.12 Critical approaches to Disgrace
12. Fri 7.12 Ethics, Literature, Politics – What can post-colonial perspectives add to
philosophical ethics.
13. Tue 11.12 Text seminar on Jonathan Lear, “Ethical Thought and the Problem of
Communication”. Concluding discussion.
14. Fri 14.12 Examination
The exam will suffice for 3 etcs credits. (Those who are unable to participate on the
examination date can hand in a course diary 12-14 000 which concisely discusses 75 % of the
lectures, including ethcial aspects of the novel Disgrace.) For an additional 2 etcs credits you
should write a 5-6 page essay on a topic related to the course, using a minimum of 4 of the
articles/chapters in the reading list. The deadline for course diary and essay is on Monday
17.12. Both should be e-mailed to me, nora.hamalainen@helsinki.fi.
Reading list:
Please give priority to the bolded articles.
2. Martha Nussbaum, “Sophocles’ Antigone: conflict, vision, and simplification”, in
The Fragility of Goodness (revised edition 2001), Cambridge University Press.
--- Flawed Crystals: “James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy”,
New Literary History, vol. 5, nr. 1 (autumn 1983).
3. Cora Diamond “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is”, New
Literary History, vol. 5, no. 1 (autumn 1983) pp. 155-169.
--- “Anything but Argument”, The Realistic Spirit – Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the
Mind, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991.
4. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness” and “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation
with Bryan Magee”, in Existentialists and Mystics– Writings in Philosophy and Literature,
Chatto & Windus, London.
5. Posner, Richard (1997) “Against Ethcial Criticism”, Philosophy and Literature, vol.
21, no. 1, pp. 1-27.
Candace Vogler, “The Moral of the Story”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 1, Autumn 2007.
6. Robert Pippin, Chapters 1 and 2, “Modern Morals” and “A Kind of Morbid Modernity”
in Henry James and Modern Moral Life, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
7. Stanley Cavell, “Ibsen” in Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the
Moral Life, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.
10. J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace (novel).
11. Alice Crary, J. M. Coetzee, Moral Thinker, in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics –
Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, eds. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
Derek Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee's
‘Disgrace’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 98-121.
Michael McDunnah, “Sympathy, Subjectivity, and the Narration of Disgrace,” in
Encountering disgrace – Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, ed. Bill McDonald
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009)
Simone Drichel “Disgrace”, in A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee, ed. Tim Mehigan
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011).
12. Marais, Mike, "J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination," Journal
of Modern Literature 29(2): 75-93.
Sanders, Mark, 2002, "Disgrace," Interventions 4(3): 363-73.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2002, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and Certain
Scenes of Teaching,” diacritics 32 (3-4): 17-31.
13. Jonathan Lear, “Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication”, in J. M.
Coetzee and Ethics – Philosophical Perspectives on Ethics, eds. Anton Leist and Peter
Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).