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Full Description
Why we read literature and why we should read literature are age-old questions that have, in recent years, gained unprecedented scope and intensity, against the backdrop of what has been perceived as a world-wide crisis in the humanities. While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, in this volume values of literature are approached in the plural: we argue that the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. The three parts of the book explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; the cognitive, affective, and social values of literature; and the construction and questioning of literary values in society. Throughout the book, we discuss the different things literature can do - ranging from affirmation of social dogmas to its capacities for self-questioning and challenging of moral certainties - through the dynamic interplay of its ethical and aesthetic, cognitive and affective aspects. Literature not only reflects and draws on the values of the historical world from which it stems; it also actively addresses, challenges, and transforms those values and explores new ways to understand value. Through these complementary processes, literature engages in its own distinctively literary forms of value inquiry.
Contents
Hanna Meretoja and Pirjo Lyytikäinen: Introduction - Why We Read: The Plural Values of Literature
Part One: Literature and Ethics
Hanna Meretoja: A Sense of History—A Sense of the Possible: Nussbaum and Hermeneutics on the Ethical Potential of Literature
Angela Locatelli: The Moral and the Fable: A Fluid Relationship in Artistic Literature
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan: From Representation to Performance: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Literature and Ethics
Colin Davis: What Can Literature Do? Jorge Semprun, Militancy, and the Scandal of Art
Part Two: Cognitive, Affective, and Social Values
Vera Nünning: Cognitive Science and the Value of Literature for Life
Ansgar Nünning: "The Extension of our Sympathies": George Eliot's Aesthetic Theory and Narrative Technique as a Key to the Affective, Cognitive, and Social Value of Literature
Saija Isomaa: How Are Literary Genres Valuable? A Value-Pluralist Approach to Genres
Part Three: Questioning and Constructing the Values of Literature
Kristina Malmio: The Role of Debate in Creating the Aesthetic, Cultural, and Social Value of Literature
Tero Eljas Vanhanen: Can We Do Wrong with Fiction? Empathy, Exclusion, and Enmity in The Turner Diaries
Magnus Persson: The Literature Myth
About the Authors
Index
