"Let me look again": The Moral Philosophy and Literature Debate at 40

Abstract:

This article explores the relationship between ethics and literature, particularly as it has been conceived in academic debates since the early 1980s. It offers a reconciliation of the dichotomy between literature and moral philosophy through the concept of bifocality: writing that responds to the moral demands of a lived reality in both a philosophical and literary way. I suggest that bifocal writing is often found in works of testimony. Primo Levi's 1986 work The Drowned and the Saved, a collection of essays on the significance of the Holocaust, is then presented as an arch example.