A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Abstract
The aim of this project is to explore the links between imaginative literature and our overall moral concerns. In tackling this theme, already explored by the work of Jacques Bouveresse and Michel Zink, I want to focus in particular on the way in which imaginative literature highlights an essential dimension of living together, namely the difficulty human beings have in finding their way through the profusion of ethical demands.
My simple starting point is to argue that imaginative literature offers us a multitude of individual cases designed to shed light on the difficulties of moral practice. The literary work accomplishes this task by exerting a dual action on us: poetic on the one hand, and fictional on the other. The power of poetry frees us from our immediate empirical attachments; poetry transports us. Fiction, on the other hand, settles us elsewhere, within the worlds it evokes. These two operations are complementary because, by wrenching us from our everyday worries, poetic exaltation facilitates our imaginary immersion in fictional universes.
