Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism

Abstract

Ethical literary criticism reads interprets and analyzes literature from an ethical perspective. It argues that literature is a unique expression of ethic and morality within a certain historical period, and that literature is not just an art of language but rather an art of text. In light of ethical literary criticism, moral enlightenment and education are literature’s primary function, while aesthetic appreciation is merely second to it. Specifically, ethical literary criticism seeks to unpack the ethical features of literary works, to describe characters and their lives from the vantage point of ethics, and to make ethical judgments about them. In the history of human civilization, mankind underwent two important processes: natural selection and ethical selection. Natural selection allowed human beings to evolve from apes physically, whereas ethical selection distinguishes them from animals spiritually. In an ethical sense, mankind is the outcome of the Sphinx factor, which can be seen as the combination of the human and animal factors. The Sphinx factor is the central element expressed in literary works.