Ethics and Literature – First International Conference
University of Porto (Portugal), May 21-23, 2015
Languages: English, Portuguese
There is a pleasure from learning the simple truth, and there is a pleasure from learning that the truth is not simple.
– Wayne C. Booth
What ethical issues do the processes of storytelling involve? Does the way humans act reflect their past reading experiences? Is literature readable in ethical terms? Can scholars address Good and Evil in Fiction? Can scholars address Good and Evil through Fiction? And should they?
All of these questions have been asked since the dawn of fiction (and philosophy) and will continue to puzzle and excite. More often than not, however, particularly in the 20th century, they have been cast aside as either misleading or unscientific. The Ethical Turn movement started in the 1980s and contributions by authors like Wayne C. Booth, J. Hillis Miller, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Altieri, Stanley Cavell, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Cora Diamond and Jacques Ranciére have brought these issues back to the center stage of academic reflection, meriting also the attention of scholars like Sandra Laugier, Robert Eaglestone, Stephen K. George and Marjorie Garber. Since then, applied studies abound in Education, Psychiatry, Neurology and even Management, including Robert Coles and Sandra Sucher’s influential MBA programme on The Moral Leader. This conference seeks to promote a dialogue between the theorists and the practitioners of ethical literary criticism.
The organizers invite scholars coming from the fields of Literary Studies and Philosophy, but also History, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics and Management, Psychiatry, Psychology and Education.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ethical Literary Criticism
- Uses of Literature in Ethical Theory
- Ethics of Reading
- Literature and Engagement
- The resurgence of Realisms
- Ethics of Authorship
- Ethics of Care
- Empathy
- Uses of Ethics and Literature in
- The Role of Fiction in Human Biological Evolution and Ethical Behavior
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Geoffrey Galt Harpham – President and Director of the National Humanities Center; Visiting Research Professor of English at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of several books, including The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (1987), Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (1992), Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999) and The Character of Criticism (2006).
Robert Eaglestone – Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London; author of several books including Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (1999) and The Very Short OUP Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (2013).
Proposals for individual papers or panels Please provide the title and the abstract (max. 300 words) of the paper you are proposing; your name, institutional affiliation, and email address; and a brief statement (max. 100 words) about your work and your publications. If you are proposing a panel, also include a brief statement of the panel’s objectives.
Please send the proposals (PDF or Word) to ethicsandliterature@letras.up.pt, by March 31, 2015