"Role models", conversation and the ethical drive

Ian MacKillop

pp. 152-166

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

I am going to start with pictures and go on to conversations. By pictures I mean the creation of human figures in outline, or what might be called verbal statuary in literature. There are many connections between ethics and literature: we seek and find in literature dramatisation of ethical issues, sometimes in straightforward ways as in, say, The Merchant of Venice (which plays through summum jus summum injuria). More subtly, there is ethical interest tangled intricately into the art of fiction. One such involvement is in the pictures, the figures of social types in fiction which satisfy our ways of ethical rumination about "what we are supposed to do".