LN254      One Unit
Literature and Aspects of Ethics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

Although an A-level pass or equivalent in Literature is useful, it is not an absolute requirement (especially for General Course students).

a) Literary treatment/projection of the aspects of ethics, focusing on the classical ideas of Aristotle and Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, developed in modern times by Sartre, Lacan, Bernard Williams and Michel Foucault. The course will draw on a range of themes arising from the interface between literary and philosophical studies and will explore such issues as the objectivity of moral reasoning (the question whether the practices that are traditionally and factually legitimated by religion, law or politics are indeed worthy of recognition); the spiritual crisis of the modern world (desire, guilt and innocence); technological omnipotence versus determinism; and the illusion of liberty in a tolerant democracy based on consensus.  It will also be concerned with such questions as whether philosophy and literature, when combined, can achieve more than the sum of the two parts.

b) The course is based on a carefully chosen range of short stories from world literature (including such authors as Kafka, Murakami, Kundera, Borges, Bessie Head, Isabel Allende etc.) where there is either a direct allusion to or a strong parallel with the key ethical issues.

c) Related trips to galleries and theatre productions during the year.

d) Use of archive recordings of authors, and video.

e) Students encouraged to draw upon background in their main discipline, and to read widely.

1 hours of lectures and 1 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Structured activities during the reading week in the AT and WT. Revision tutorials in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays in the AT and WT.

Literary texts: Bashevis Singer The Spinoza of Market Street; Franz Kafka  In The Penal Colony; Isabel Allende The Schoolteacher's Guest; Thomas Mann Death in Venice; Jorge-Luis Borges  Blue Tigers; Haruki  Murakami The Ice Man; Jean-Paul Sartre The Wall; Guy de Maupassant The Model; Heinrich Böll To Work or not to Work; Bessie Head A Power Struggle. 

Additional reading: Peter Singer and Renata Singer (eds), The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through  Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2011); Luc Bovens, 'The Ethics of Making Risky Decisions for Others'. in Mark White (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Economics (Oxford University Press, 2019); Brian Stock, Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture (Brandeis, 2008).

Exam (70%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Project (30%, 2500 words)

a presentation (in the form of a topic-specific discussion) constitutes an essential part of the project-work