English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Literary Theory - General & Miscellaneous, Philosophy & Literature

Agents and Lives

Name: Agents and Lives
Author: S. L. Goldberg
ISBN: 9780521112444

by S. L. Goldberg

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Overview

Agents and lives offers a new and important rethinking of the traditional 'humanist' view of literature. That tradition's valuation of literature for its 'moral import' is extended in a wider, more complex, open and exploratory understanding of those terms. Literature, not simply in a didactic or exemplary sense, represents a kind of moral thinking in its own right - a kind necessary to our moral understanding, and which moral philosophy has spoken of, but cannot itself supply. Goldberg demonstrates the way in which literature combines a sense of people as voluntary agents and as moral beings whose lives extend well beyond the voluntary and deliberate, manifesting themselves in everything the individual feels and suffers, as well as in everything he or she does. The book argues that this double way of thinking about people corresponds to traditional literary criticism's most vital insights into the way works of literature both depict and themselves manifest modes of human life. Such criticism avoids the needs for separate 'aesthetic' judgments (since all literary judgment becomes moral) and for treating a work of art as if it were simply the voluntary expression of a conscious and responsible moral 'self'. Goldberg's argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance, focusing on central examples from George Eliot's novels and Pope's poetry. A final chapter assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.