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- Title
Literature, Recognition, Ethics: Struggles for Recognition and the Search for Ethical Principles.
- Authors
Fluck, Winfried
- Abstract
How can American Studies, and more specifically, American literary and cultural studies, remain relevant as a field? Can a turn to ethics be helpful? Literary texts and aesthetic objects may be effective in dramatizing injustice but in what way can they contribute to the formulation of ethical principles? Questions about the possibility of ethical foundations have not been restricted to fictional texts and aesthetic objects but have become a central philosophical topic in the wake of postmodernism and poststructuralism. In each case, theories of the subject have provided the point of departure. In its first part, this essay focuses on narratives of self-alienation, ranging from Marxism to poststructuralism, but also including some unexpected protagonists like British cultural studies and reception aesthetics, and discusses the ethical principles derived from the assumption of the subject's self-alienation. In the second part, theories that see the subject constituted by intersubjective relations are discussed as a possible alternative. In this context, the concept of recognition may open up a new perspective on the search for ethical principles in literature and art.
- Subjects
STUDY &; teaching of American literature; ETHICS; JUSTICE
- Publication
SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language & Literature, 2015, p119
- ISSN
0940-0478
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5169/seals-583870