Striking toward peace and harmony the human being is ceasely torn apart in personal, social, national life by wars, feuds, inequities and intimate personal conflicts for which there seems to be no respite. Does the human condition in interaction with others imply a constant adversity? Or, is this conflict owing to an interior or external factor of evil governing our attitudes and conduct toward the other person? To what criteria should I refer for appreciation, judgment, direction concerning my attitudes and my actions as they bear on the well-being of others? At the roots of these questions lies human experience which ought to be appropriately clarified before entering into speculative abstractions of the ethical theories and precepts. Literature, which in its very gist, dwells upon disentangling in multiple perspective the peripeteia of our life-experience offers us a unique field of source-material for moral and ethical investigations.

Literature brings preeminently to light the Moral Sentiment which pervades our life with others -- our existence tout court. Being modulated through the course of our experiences the Moral Sentiment sustains the very sense of literature and of personal human life (Tymieniecka).

Unique field of source-material for moral and ethical investigations

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
The Enigma of Good and Evil.- A Question of Interest? Between Good and Evil in Instinto de Ines by Carlos Fuentes.- Being's Wound: Evil and Explanation in the Killer Inside Me.- A Paradox of Love: The Manifestation of Life and the Moral Sentiment in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Her Son's Wife.- Levinas's Language.- Sympathy for the Devil? A Historical Tour of Literature and Cultural Representation.- Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: An Experiment in the Self-Recognition of Evil.- Beyond Evil in Heart of Darkness: Levinasian Face-to-Face as Reliable Narration.- Bartleby's Existential Reduction and Its Impact on Others.- The Intuition of Good/Evil in Marcel Proust's à la Recherche du Temps Perdu: From the Axis of Time to the Axis of Desire.- The Changing Landscapes of Good and Evil in the Moral World of Huckleberry Finn.- Nature and a Calm Mirror: Anna Maria Ortese's Ethics.- The Interplay of Virtue and Romantic Ethics in Chang-Rae Lee's a Gesture Life.- Camus' Meursault and Sartrian Irresponsibility.- Death, Truth, and Sinfulness: Of Various Characters and Scenes in Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Comedias bárbaras.- Accusation, Betrayal and Murder in Literature.- Autobiography and the Impossibility of Evil in Kurt H. Wolff's Existential Sociology.- Adventures in Greeneland: The Moral Sentiment in Three Novels of Graham Greene.- On the Fourfold Ontology of Evil Throughout Western Tradition and its Final Disappearance in the Present Time.- Searching for the Abandoned Soul: Dostoevsky on the Suffering of Humanity.- Reading Achille Mizzi: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of the Christian Narrative.- Gilles Deleuze et la Littérature: Le Langage, la Vie et la Doctrine du Jugement.- Culture and the Philosophy of Life: The True, the Good, the Beautiful, andthe Sacred.- The Phenomenology of Ethical Criticism: How Literature Affects Ethical Development.- Moral Sentiment and the Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Literature.- The Aesthetics of Salvation in Sartre's Nausea.- With Foolish Shadows, With Hollow Signs: A Reflection on Subjective Perception and Personal Identity in Hispano-American Golden Age Intrigue Comedies.- The Medicine-Dreams of Chief Plenty-Coups: A Study in Phenomenological Anthropology.- Literature in Search of Moral Standards.- Searching Moral Standards in a Love Diatribe.- Bizet's Carmen.- In Search of Moral Standards Walker Percy's Lancelot.- In Search of a Moral Erotic Standard: Female Subjectivity and Eros in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Rough-Hewn and The Brimming Cup.- Morals in History. Violence and the Ideal of Peace.- Phantom Relations and the Writer's Niche in Paul Auster's Leviathan.- Some Freedom Within a Small Range: Tagore on Moral Standard.- The Search for a Universal Standard of Morality: Filial Piety and its Chinese Experience.- In First Century Rome: A Test Case of Literary Influence on Ethical Development.- Literature and the Play of Attention: A New/Ancient Look at the Roots of Evil.- Dostoyevsky on the Problem of Evil.- Poetry in the Cerebral Cortex, The Nervous System and the Digestive Tracts: A Study of Romanus Egudu'S Moral Poetry.- Asymmetry and Normativity: Levinas Reading Dostoyevsky on Desire, Responsibility, and Suffering.- The Redemptive Gestures of the Poetry of Wis?awa Szymborska.- A Life Beyond Go(O)D: A Criticism of Wisdom and the Foundation of a Poetic Conception of Life Based on Goethe's Faust.- Antigone's (Re)Turn: The ?thos of the Coming Community.- I Know Everything: The Governess's Failures of Consciousness in the Turnof the Screw.- The Politics of Intersubjectivity and the Logic of Discourse.- Literature as the Laboratory of the Moral Life: Building Moral Communities through Literary Study.