You are cordially invited to this discussion with the author hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature.
Date: Wednesday, 29 January 2025
Time: 17:30 – 19:00.
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Title: “Let Me Look Again: The Moral Philosophy and Literature Debate at 40”
Abstract: this will not be a talk in the traditional sense, but an opportunity to discuss with the author an article that has already been published: Ruth Murphy’s “”Let me look again”: The Moral Philosophy and Literature Debate at 40″, New Literary History 55.1 (Winter 2024): 21-46. If you would like to take part, it would be helpful if you could read the article beforehand (it should easily be accessible from any Bilkent computer at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/932369). Feel free to prepare questions or observations and bring them along so we can discuss them with Ms. Murphy.
Original abstract: This article explores the relationship between ethics and literature, particularly as it has been conceived in academic debates since the early 1980s. It offers a reconciliation of the dichotomy between literature and moral philosophy through the concept of bifocality: writing that responds to the moral demands of a lived reality in both a philosophical and literary way. I suggest that bifocal writing is often found in works of testimony. Primo Levi’s 1986 work The Drowned and the Saved, a collection of essays on the significance of the Holocaust, is then presented as an arch example.
Biographical note: Ruth Murphy is currently a post-doctoral associate at the University of Sheffield with the Life Worth Living project, an initiative that advocates deep reflection on the good life in academic teaching and research. She will soon defend her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Cambridge, entitled ‘Ethical Vision in the 20th Century: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin’. In February of this year, Ruth will begin a new post-doctoral role at Cambridge on the history and memory of Allied prisoners of war in Italy.