ENGL 4020

Literature as Moral Inquiry

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024. Courses of Study 2024-2025 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

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, Marx, and Nietzsche, and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Other writers we will most probably read include Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

When Offered Fall or Spring.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS, KCM-AS)
Satisfies Requirement This course counts toward the post-1800 requirement for English majors.

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