The View from Beyond: Ethics and Literature

The present account aims to show that transcending towards the other is an immanent feature of literary structure and that its reconstruction provides justification for the moral aspect of literature. Literariness and the genre of a novel is taken under examination as an aesthetic object, so as to specify the possible extent to which it can be considered in terms of ethics. The proposed account defends a thesis that literature contains aspects which may have implications for the enhancement of individual morality. This can be shown at the level of the relationship between a reader and a literary text, and justified with reference to the ethical theory of moral sense, particularly through the notions of sympathy and detachment