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Practices of Ethical Criticism in the Teaching of Literature

Sun, April 19, 12:25 to 1:55pm, Virtual Room

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, Literature education has focused on the aesthetic appreciation of style or the reader’s aesthetic transactions with texts. Towards the 1990s, scholars have noted the emergence of an ethical turn in literary studies. The turn to ethics is now more urgent than ever given the intensification of global interconnectedness. The challenge is how educators can prepare students to navigate various moral ambiguities in today’s world. In this paper, we argue for ethical criticism as a fundamental pedagogy in Literature classrooms. Using examples from four English Literature high school classrooms in Singapore, we demonstrate how teachers employ ethical criticism to develop students’ ethical reasoning capacities and ethical sensitivity to lived experiences of others around the world.

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