Literature as Moral Inquiry

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What can literary works, especially novels, tell us about moral issues? Should they be seen as suggesting a form of moral inquiry similar to the kind of philosophical discussion we get in, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? Can reading philosophical works in ethics together with novels that deal with similar themes help us understand these themes better? This course is an attempt to answer these questions. We will read selections from Aristotle, Kant, and other thinkers and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Films will include Barbie (2023) and Official Secrets (2019).