Abstract

A Kind of Light engages the ancient quarrel between the poets and the philosophers over what kind of discourse is better able to cast light on the human condition, particularly on our moral lives. It begins with the premise that attempts to resolve the quarrel cannot hope to do so by merging the two realms into a unitary form of discourse. Instead, we must be looking for a link between literature and moral philosophy. ;What would constitute a successful attempt to make this link? One that preserves the distinctive characteristics of both literature and moral philosophy. Following an analysis of three dominant models for the literary-ethical relationship that have failed to meet this criterion, the dissertation posits an alternative model, the "Evocative Text." According to this model, the text does not communicate a particular, unmediated ideology or set of moral norms. It is not an evaluative communication. Rather, it is an evocation of value itself, an evocation that the dissertation calls "ontological recognition." ;The relationship between literature and ethics must be understood as a two-part movement. We must begin with the unique communicative capability of literature and with what happens to us, the readers, because of that mode of communication. This stage, borrowing a concept from New Testament scholar Willi Marxsen, is the "first sentence" of literature. Literature does not communicate an ideology. Instead, it evokes "the objective ground in reality itself of our ineradicable confidence in the final worth of our existence." Only when we have understood this first sentence can we bring to the text the kinds of analyses necessary to elicit from it its "second sentence," or particular normative conclusions. ;Some specific stories and novels of Joseph Conrad serve as the literary-ethical domain within which the evocative model is tested. Analyses of three novels--The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim--form the central part of the dissertation. A final chapter argues that "creativity" is the proper name for the universal human--and more than human--capacity that is evoked by the literary experience