ABSTRACT
The conclusion notes that appreciative receptivity to discursive art highlighting ethical unease and inviting simulation of internal dissonances is itself a striking transcultural phenomenon. In oral and non-axial, scribal and pre-axial, or axial and post-axial contexts, imaginative discourse suggests that it is not only impossible but also undesirable to evade these uncomfortable experiences. Indeed, imaginative works imply that the dignity, significance, and potential moral beauty of being human are bound up with the way one undergoes, endures, and addresses dissonances awakened by ethical sense. Were imaginative discourse not to affect people in ways often felt to be transformative and life orienting, it could not participate as a nonhuman actor and virtual ethical interlocutor in communal deliberations with sufficient strength to arouse axial philosophical-theistic anxieties. These anxieties—sometimes, but not always, in different forms—continue within modernity, and they persist in stirring up suspicions of literature’s seemingly autonomous signifying of an ethical sense invested with radically iconoclastic, an-archic energies. Once imaginative discourse is recognized as addressing affective dissonances constitutive of humans’ deep sociality, reasons for why it should be a focus of intense communal interest come into view. Literary history is embedded in cultural history but irreducible to it.
