Volume 13, Issue 2, February 2015, Pages 644–653
Pascal Ally Hussein1
1 Department of English and African Culture, Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Bukavu, P.O. Box 854, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Original language: English
Copyright © 2015 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper is a criticism of the theory according to which the primary aim of literature is to give pleasure, and literature does not teach anything new to human beings. The paper first attempts to place the triad literature-pleasure-ethics in a wide context of literary-critical and rhetorical debates that span centuries, from the Antiquity to the modern times. Then it proceeds to a critical examination of this doctrine of the primacy of pleasure over ethics in literature. In the end, it posits that there is no opposition between pleasure and ethics: literature only delights as it instructs. But inasmuch as ethics is the core layer, and pleasure the surface layer of literature, the former overrides the latter, and so reading involves moving from the outside to the inside of a work.
Author Keywords: core layer, delighting, instruction, surface layer, teaching.
Pascal Ally Hussein1
1 Department of English and African Culture, Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Bukavu, P.O. Box 854, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Original language: English
Copyright © 2015 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
This paper is a criticism of the theory according to which the primary aim of literature is to give pleasure, and literature does not teach anything new to human beings. The paper first attempts to place the triad literature-pleasure-ethics in a wide context of literary-critical and rhetorical debates that span centuries, from the Antiquity to the modern times. Then it proceeds to a critical examination of this doctrine of the primacy of pleasure over ethics in literature. In the end, it posits that there is no opposition between pleasure and ethics: literature only delights as it instructs. But inasmuch as ethics is the core layer, and pleasure the surface layer of literature, the former overrides the latter, and so reading involves moving from the outside to the inside of a work.
Author Keywords: core layer, delighting, instruction, surface layer, teaching.
How to Cite this Article
Pascal Ally Hussein, “Literature, Pleasure, and Ethics: A Historico-Critical Investigation,” International Journal of Innovation and Scientific Research, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 644–653, February 2015.
