Narrative Ethics

Newton, Adam Zachary

doi:10.4159/9780674041462

Cited by 191 publications

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“…This criticism has ranged from classical mandates for Christian moral formation (Graff, 1987) to mid-twentieth-century interests in democratic dispositions (Seubert, 1941), to contemporary concerns with representation and social justice in the literature and media (Toliver, 2021). And where narrative ethics has been framed using the classical language of virtue formation (Nussbaum, 1992), moral thought experiments (Morson, 2013), or Levinasian-inspired encounters with alterity and the "Other" (Newton, 1995), scholars in rhetorical narratology have explicitly avoided extensive a priori theoretical commitments (Phelan, 2014) and instead regarded the framework as a flexible toolkit for examining narrative resources, available for a range of ethical literary criticism (consider, e.g., the recent rise of critical race and queer narratologies; see Sohn, 2014 andWarhol &Lanser, 2015).…”

Section: Rhetorical Narrative Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Rhetorically: Discussing the Ethics of Narrative Form

LeBlanc,

Stornaiuolo

2023

Journal of Literacy Research

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In this study, we explore discussions of literature in a high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, examining how students read rhetorically. Reading rhetorically considers the ethical effects of narrative content as it is mediated through character dialogue and action, narrator discourse, and the author's organization: a narrative as a story told to someone for some rhetorical purpose. Drawing from rhetorical narratology, we analyzed data collected in a 12th-Grade ELA classroom during student-driven Socratic seminars to ask: how did students address the ethics of various narrative situations as they talked about literature? We found that youth engaged in interpretive discussions that grappled with the complexities of ethical positioning in narrative. We argue that ELA classrooms are key spaces to help students examine how narratives act on readers, how readers act on narratives, and the ethical dimensions of such interpretive work.

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