Literature, Economics, and a Turn to Content

In much of the recent scholarship on economics and literature, the depth of insight is inversely proportional to the status claimed for literature as such. For example, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s Cents and Sensibility argues that economists need to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims about genuine value precisely because they have attended so closely to the markets structuring cultural production. What ultimately stands out in recent scholarship on economics and literature is its turn away from complex accounts of the nature of literary form and its turn toward considerations of the representation of economic life.

A Comparison Between the Goddess Image in Ancient China and Ancient Greek Mythology from the Perspective of Female Values

<p>Mythology, as a special cultural carrier, can reflect people’s spiritual values in a certain period and region. In ancient Chinese mythology and ancient Greek mythology, there are some goddess with similar attributes or symbolic meaning. Their symbolic attributes essentially represent some specific areas of women’s values, such as fertility, wisdom, love and marriage. Based on the mythology of ancient China and Greece as well as the ancient social background of the two countries, this paper analyzes and compares the goddess images in the myths of the two countries from the perspective of fertility, wisdom, love and marriage in the female values. In the aspect of fertility, China in the matriarchal society showed the worship of the supremacy of women. In the aspect of wisdom, the ancient Greek society affirmed the importance of moral wisdom, and also emphasized the necessity of acquiring personal skills, interests and reputation. In the aspect of love and marriage, women in both countries were victims of the patriarchal society, but the ancient Greek society emphasized the pursuit of individual hedonism and freedom. What’s more, the goddess images in Chinese mythology are romantic, while the goddess images in ancient Greek mythology is more humanistic. From these aspects, the comparative analysis of the two goddesses can reveal the characteristics, social causes and evolution of the ancient women’s values of the people of the two countries.</p><p> </p>

Love, Truth and Moral Judgement

A famous section of 1 Corinthians and some influential passages in the work of Iris Murdoch seem to suppose a significant connection between the higher human love of agape and moral knowledge: that, perhaps, the former may provide access to the latter. Following some sceptical attention to this possibility, this paper turns to a more modest suggestion of Plato's Symposium that the ‘lower’ human love of eros might be a transitional stage to higher moral love or knowledge of the good. Still, while conceding that this may be so, the present paper argues that any moral transformations of such loves would need to be informed by moral wisdom or knowledge rather than vice versa. However, the paper concludes that there are ultimately deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions between the epistemic and agapeic dimensions of moral life.

Tyranny, Self, and Genre in Pliny's Letter 5.8

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes.