Narrative does not simply tell a story; it discovers and creates story as well. Mark Ledbetter argues that an important dimension of narrative is its ability to reveal the virtuous life. He examines three narrative texts: James Agee's A Death in the Family, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, and Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To. His goal is to demonstrate how a study of narrative structure, especially the element of character, explores and reveals the life of virtue. He concludes with a discussion of how moral criticism has a place in post-modern literary reflection and how the two can...

Victims and the Postmodern Narrative suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world. Postmodern narrative is an important way to reveal and discuss who are society's victims, inviting the reader to become one with them. A close reading of fiction by Toni Morrison, Patrick Suskind, D.M. Thomas, Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee reveals a violence imposed on gender, race and the body-politic. Such violence is not new to the postmodern world, but merely reflects Western culture's religious traditions, as the author demonstrates...

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn,...