Abstract

In this dissertation, I ask how literary critics like Martha Nussbaum and Charles Altieri are reconsidering what literature can teach us about ethics. To historicize their project, I confront moral theory with the problematical styles innovated by modernist authors. Modern writers created forms that undermine the rationality philosophers use to derive ethics and obscure narrative contexts that might serve readers as moral exemplum. I argue that modernism critiques ethical theories even as it creates its own profound moral quandaries and ethical insights--versions of modernist difficulty that were richly imagined by Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner. ;I begin with the problems of narrative. In reading Henry James, Nussbaum finds a theory of moral attention. I suggest that Stein, while developing aspects of James's aesthetic, undermines this ideal in works like Melanctha by showing how we might obscure and burden, even betray, our relationships by being more attentive. ;In a chapter on Faulkner, I demonstrate how narrative voice might not reflect a consistent moral perspective, as Nussbaum sees it, but rather might enact a moral dialectic. In As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner presents characters who struggle for moral authority by competing for narrative authority. ;I then turn to modern poetry. Altieri suggests that if we combine expressivist ethics with expressivist aesthetics, we can see how poetry teaches us to publicize our moral values. This notion is challenged by the overdetermined expressive effects of Eliot's The Waste Land. By disconnecting aesthetic tonalities from cultural themes, Eliot's poem reflects the moral dissonance of competing value systems. ;In my fourth chapter, I look at the way Williams tries to focus his art on surfaces, on the concrete and as a result finds himself entangled in a provocatively sexualized morality. This dilemma motivates him in Paterson 5 to deconstruct abstract moral categories while he tries to ground his own morality in the concrete