Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the moment of my commitment, I either (1) arbitrarily assume a constancy in my feelings which is not really in my power to establish, or (2) I accept in advance that I shall have to carry out, at a given moment, an action which will in no way reflect my state of mind when I do carry it out. In the first case I am lying to myself, in the second I consent in advance to lie to someone else.
Gabriel MarcelIf, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms. For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
Michel de MontaigneMartha Nussbaum, Tobin Siebers, Robert Coles, Richard Eldridge, and Wayne Booth, among others, have revitalized the field of ethics and literature by investigating how the study of narrative can uniquely enrich our understanding and teaching of ethical concepts. As I have mentioned, Nussbaum has gone so far as to claim that literature is a form of moral philosophy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914 , pp. 114 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001