Emotion in ethics, rhetoric, and the creative process: The tragedy of Coetzee’s woman warrior

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat is the social function of literature? What new relationships between the ivory tower and the surrounding world, between literature and ethics, are emerging? How do they affect the human/animal, male/female, reason/emotion binaries? Can literature transcend these simplistic dualisms and “transform consciousness by mobilizing” emotions? Can emotive criticism and early feminist theory help literature bridge the gap between the academy and applied ethics? These questions have been revived by the emergence of international research projects on emotions and animals (Bump 57–62, 79n1). One of the most important literary contributions to both projects has been Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. His protagonist, Costello, attempts a kind of academic activism that is inspired, but apparently ultimately defeated, by anger, an anger particularly obvious in Coetzee’s revisions of his manuscripts, published here for the first time. The revolt of Costello’s audience and Coetzee’s readers against his/her attempts to reveal and resolve some of the ethical failures of factory farming, “research” universities, and the climate crisis can be illuminated by Aristotle’s, Brecht’s, and Burkhert’s theories of tragedy.