ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of ethical discussions of literature, beginning with the proposal to banish the poets from the ideal city in Book 10 of Plato's Republic. One of the reasons for this banishment is that poets purvey illusion not truth. Although few thinkers or critics agree with Plato, his sense that art may be harmful has never been definitively rebutted; and it recurs in surprising places, such as Emmanuel Levinas's essay of 1948, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, which describes art in recognisably Platonic terms as the dangerous propagation of falsehood. Other thinkers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, are sensitive to the danger of art but attempt to defuse it by finding beneficial effects in potentially harmful works. The ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism in the latter part of the twentieth century sparked a concerted attempt to find ethical value in literature and the experience of reading; and the rise of trauma studies, inspired by the work of Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, gave an ethical inflection to deconstructive and poststructuralist criticism. Even so, the shadow of the Platonic condemnation of art hovers over the project of ethical criticism. The chapter argues that literature may be ethical not because it offers the prospect of moral improvement but because it serves as a terrain where the stakes of ethics are played out.
