Course: Discovery Seminar: Ethics in Fiction
Institution: Emory University
Faculty: Dr. Brad K. Hawley

Excerpt from Syllabus

Welcome to the Ethics in Fiction Discovery Seminar! In this course, we will read short stories, novels, and comics to discuss fictional narratives as acts of communication between writer and reader. This act of communication presents an ethical view of the world in very rich and complex ways. So, we will need to consider in equally complex ways the ethical issues raised and addressed (though not always answered) in these stories. As we discuss ethics, which we are using as a descriptive term, we also will be thinking about virtues like love, justice and compassion, as well as intellectual virtues that we will define over the course of the semester. And we will also make the jump from fictional texts to the real world by considering how
these ethics and virtues impact us in our daily lives.

Compassion will be our key virtue, and we will study the ways fiction gives us the opportunity to practice the virtue of compassion through our empathizing in subtle ways with a variety of characters in a variety of circumstances. And through that empathizing, the author guides the reader to some claims about what is the best way to live. In that way, fiction presents views of right and wrong actions, of certain notions of “good” and “bad” in the world. However, we need to make sure that we do not look at all fictional narratives as simplistic moral fables; we need to avoid that simplification. Rather, we need to look in subtle ways at the hints of ethical ideas conveyed to us by the writer/artist through plot, character
development, point-of-view, irony, art etc.

As a class, we will focus on understanding and consensus: There are a wide range of readings of any novel, for example, but disagreements about what a text means depends upon first finding interpretive
common ground. Our class will seek to identify the common ground for each narrative we read, before looking at what in the text is more open to interpretation. This class will also involve reading some
rhetorical theory about ethics in fiction and the concept of the implied author. Finally, each student will select a text from the assigned reading on which to conduct further research on the ethical issues—or
virtues—raised by the narrative.