Literary study as an education in moral perception and imagination

ABSTRACT

This article explores how literary study engages readers’ moral perception and imagination. Although some philosophers discuss reading as a largely solitary activity, this article explores social practices of reading common in English language arts classrooms in secondary schools. The article shows how reading with others can change the quality of moral perception and imagination in literary study. Reading with others, the article contends, can involve an ethic focused on the good of knowing one’s ways of seeing make a difference to others. The article defends social practices of reading by arguing they can broaden and complicate students’ moral perception and imagination by making students accountable to texts, one another, and the wider world.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• morality
• literature
• perception
• imagination

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the journal's editors and reviewers, as well as VCU's Critical Reading Group, for their close readings of this article and their invaluable advice.

Disclosure statement

Ross Collin does not have any financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of his research.

Notes

1. Several moral philosophers, including Hämäläinen (2015) and Nussbaum (1990), limit their analyses of ethics and literature to investigations of narrative literature. For an argument about analyzing the ethical dimension of both narrative and non-narrative literature, see Wayne Booth (1988).

2. Pressing Murdoch’s argument forward, Alice Crary (2007) argues some theories define ethics in overly-narrowly ways because they define objectivity and rationality in overly-narrow ways that illegitimately remove ethics from the picture of what is in human life and human reason.

3. In Political Emotions, Nussbaum (2013) describes how people can experience art together and reflect on art’s meanings. However, in contrast to her earlier work on literature and ethics (e.g. Love’s Knowledge), Nussbaum pitches her argument in later works at a more general level and does not discuss social experiences of art in terms of moral perception. Hämäläinen (2015) explores this difference between Nussbaum’s earlier and later work on literature and ethics (see 135–146).

4. One indication of the popularity of transaction is its prominence in ELA’s two most-read methods textbooks, Christenbury and Lindblom’s (2016) Making the Journey: Being and Becoming a Teacher of English Language Arts and Jim Burke’s The English Teacher’s Companion (Burke 2012).

5. As Gomes notes, Murdoch discusses joint attention to artwork. However, Hämäläinen does not engage this part of Murdoch’s work and Murdoch does not specifically address how people read literature together (e.g. as students in transactional ELA classes read literature together).