Shaped by Stories

Marshall Gregory

Description

In his latest book, Marshall Gregory begins with the premise that our lives are saturated with stories, ranging from magazines, books, films, television, and blogs to the words spoken by politicians, pastors, and teachers. He then explores the ethical implication of this nearly universal human obsession with narratives. Through careful readings of Katherine Anne Porter’s "The Grave," Thurber’s "The Catbird Seat," as well as David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights, Gregory asks (and answers) the question: How do the stories we absorb in our daily lives influence the kinds of persons we turn out to be? Shaped by Stories is accessible to anyone interested in ethics, popular culture, and education. It will encourage students and teachers to become more thoughtful and perceptive readers of stories.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Literary Criticism
• Books
• Modern
• PHILOSOPHY
• Cumbres borrascosas
• Modern history
• Wuthering Heights
• Katherine Anne Porter
• James Thurber
• Les Hauts de Hurlevent (homonymie)
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Reading
• David Copperfield

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161156
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

SHAPED BY STORIES
MARSHALL
GREGORY

S HAPED BY S TORIES

The
Ethical Power
of Narratives

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2009 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
The Catbird Seat originally published in book form by James Thurber. Copyright 1945, 1973 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and the Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Grave from The Leaning Tower and Other Stories . Copyright 1944, 1972 by Katherine Anne Porter. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and of Random House UK.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gregory, Marshall W., 1940-
Shaped by stories : the ethical power of narratives / Marshall Gregory.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-268-02974-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 0-268-02974-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English literature-Study and teaching. 2. American literature-Study and teaching. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Literature and morals. I. Title.
PR 35.G75 2009
820.9 353-dc22
2009027705
ISBN 9780268161156
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
T O V ALISKA ,
the one and only
From the time we are born, the narrative cradle of story rocks us to the collective heartbeat of our species, ushering us across the threshold of consciousness and into the domain of humanity .
- CHAPTER 1
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface
CHAPTER ONE Reading for Life
CHAPTER TWO What Is Ethical Agency, Why Should You Care, and What Do Stories Have to Do with Your Ethical Agency?
CHAPTER THREE For Good or Ill: Stories as Ethical Education
CHAPTER FOUR Stories and the Ethics of Experience
CHAPTER FIVE Judgment that Bites, Assent that Risks
CHAPTER SIX Story as Companionship
CHAPTER SEVEN Ethics of Narrative in a Practical Vein: Ethical Invitations in Katherine Anne Porter s The Grave
CHAPTER EIGHT Ethics of Narrative in a Practical Vein Once More: Invitations to Misogyny in James Thurber s The Catbird Seat
CHAPTER NINE Ethical Engagements Over Time: Reading and Rereading David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights
CHAPTER TEN Postscript: Toward an Ethical Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have always been struck by the poignancy of Samuel Johnson s sad words at the end of the preface to his great dictionary: I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. Having finished this book, what strikes me now with great force is the mixed gratitude and sadness I feel that fate has allowed me to escape Johnson s melancholy condition in some ways but not in others. To those living and dead whose instruction, kindness, and support over many years are woven into the views and attitudes that form this book, it gives me deep pleasure to acknowledge my gratitude and my indebtedness.
First I must acknowledge Wayne Booth, whose death in October 2005 was a great loss to the humanities in general, to the discipline of English in particular, and to me in a deeply personal way. Wayne, as he insisted on being called, was my teacher in graduate school at the University of Chicago and was a teacher to me in all the years of our relationship until his death. In addition, Wayne was always a profoundly companionable, charming, and affectionate friend; my coauthor on previous books; and a source of inspiration for keeping at my scholarship.
In addition to Wayne Booth, I must also acknowledge the assistance and support of Robert McCauley, a philosopher and friend from Emory University who over the years has demonstrated just how generous a deep friendship can be by not only critiquing my work intellectually, which has been immensely beneficial, but hammering at me personally to keep whacking away at a project that he has honored by insisting on its importance. If Wayne Booth played a major role in getting me started, Bob McCauley has played a major role in keeping me going. Bob perfectly illustrates Aristotle s claim that true friendship is the act of wishing good things for the friend rather than oneself.
I must also acknowledge the assistance of my many students. None of them were ever aware of helping me do my research, I m sure, but as I have had occasion in class after class, and especially in the literary criticism course I teach every year, to touch on this book s issues, I found that the opportunity to explain literary and critical ideas to my students-just the pleasant duty of responding to their questions-has been important in fertilizing the intellectual soil out of which this project has grown. I have always followed the principle that if I could not make the most complicated ideas in this book clear to smart undergraduates, then those ideas probably were not yet clear in my own head.
Penultimately, I must thank both the Indiana Humanities Council and Butler University for giving me grants at different times to work on this book.
Finally, it gives me the greatest delight of all to acknowledge the unfailing support of Valiska Gregory, who, as a skillful intellectual, astute critic, gifted writer, and loving friend, has helped me in every conceivable way, not only in the writing of this book but in all the common (and sometimes nutty) projects we have undertaken ever since we met the first day of freshman orientation and fell in love as first-year college students. Valiska and our wonderful daughters, Melissa and Holly, have enriched the quality of my life and work beyond all calculation. I cannot imagine that doing anything creative would have seemed possible to me-or would have seemed worth doing even if possible-without them. To adapt to my ladies of beauty and talent what Shelley says of poetry, they are the center and the circumference of what I know and what I care about most deeply.
An earlier version of chapter 9 has appeared as Ethical Engagements over Time: Reading and Rereading David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights , Narrative 12.3 (October 2004): 281-305. The Grave by Katherine Anne Porter from The Leaning Tower and Other Stories , copyright 1944, 1972 by Katherine Anne Porter, is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and of Random House UK. The Catbird Seat, originally published in book form by James Thurber, copyright 1945, 1973 by Rosemary A. Thurber, is reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and the Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc.
PREFACE

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world .
-Vikram Chandra
This book explores the ethical implication of the universal human obsession with stories. Sales of narratives-novels, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and so on-run into the millions every year. The average American watches six hours of TV every day, most of it stories. Parents read thousands of stories to their offspring, including the old legends, fairy tales, and myths that they themselves grew up with, and when parents aren t reading to their children, the kids are absorbing other stories from Saturday morning cartoons. A new blockbuster movie can earn $40 million in its opening weekend. Video rental stores and Netflix are growth industries. People now buy their favorite TV shows on DVDs and rewatch them without commercials. Ministers and teachers and motivational speakers and politicians exert their effects on audiences mainly through stories. Most TV commercials are miniature narratives, and even the oldest stories never disappear. The summer of 2004 saw yet two more movies based on Greek myths- Troy and Alexander -while 2005 gave us a new version of Beowulf , and both movie and dramatic productions of Shakespeare s plays go on endlessly. There was yet another movie version of Beowulf in 2008, employing some of the biggest names in Hollywood (Angelina Jolie, for example). YouTube, blogs, and online publishing open up more and more avenues of storytelling and story consuming almost daily. Truly, as our bodies are surrounded by air so are our lives saturated by stories . Both air and stories are so profoundly ubiquitous that we spend hardly any time thinking about how impossible or different our lives would be with them, but once we do start such a train of thought, an inquiry into how stories potentially influence ethos can no longer be viewed as a matter of narrow academic interest. It must be viewed as a matter of broad human interest.
While most people, on reflection, will probably accept my claim that human beings are obsessed with stories, many of these same people are likely to become queasy about my additional claim that this obsession exerts a potentially serious influence on their ethos: on the kinds of persons they turn out to be. Ethos, the Greek word for character, refers to persons as ethical agents, as people who make decisions about good and bad and who decide their own conduct. Inquiry into the influences that make us the kind of agents we become-the influences that shape our character, or ethos-is called ethical criticism, which, clearly enough, derives from the word ethos itself. Ethical criticism, then, examines the influences on us that shape our ethos.
To say, however, that I have written a book of ethical criticism is to begin a path of analysis that is slippery, controversial, and confusing. It is slippery because ethical is a term used in many different ways by many different people. It is controversial bec