Abstract

The connection between literature and ethical pedagogy, intuited by many, is notoriously difficult to describe. In this essay, I discuss three ways that literature connects with ethics. The first is through form, which involves a passage or transition from “is” to “ought”; through literary language, which disturbs the habitual connections between words and things and reveals fissures over by custom and ideology; and third, through the representation of life in its contingencies, which reveals the limitations of theories, precepts, and abstractions.