Communicative Ethics as the Aura of Post-Postmodern Morality: A Study of Amy M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life and Philip Roth’s Everyman

In the postmodern era, there seems to be a pervasive decline of concept of ethics and community, leading to the devaluation of human life and moral values. The recent ethical turn in literary climate, however, has acknowledged a new version of ethics whose very quiddity needs further research. The p...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fatemeh Esmaeili, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Farid Parvaneh
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: University of Kurdistan 2023-10-01
Series:Critical Literary Studies
Subjects:
Online Access:https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_62864.html
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In the postmodern era, there seems to be a pervasive decline of concept of ethics and community, leading to the devaluation of human life and moral values. The recent ethical turn in literary climate, however, has acknowledged a new version of ethics whose very quiddity needs further research. The present study aims to not only elucidate the moral codes of post-postmodern ethics, but also depict the significant role of communicative ethics, considered by the authors to be the infrastructure of the contemporary moral issues. Ergo, this article explores the theories of Habermas in two contemporary American novels in 2006, Amy M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life and Philip Roth’s Everyman, so as to shed light on the resemblance of post-postmodern moral frames and Habermasian communicative ethics. Although the characters are initially illustrated in a postmodern setting with social alienation, solipsism, and instrumental actions, they undergo an ethical turn that is a manifestation of social and individual interactions, thus developing a cure and self-creation in the lives of the fractured characters. Finally, protagonists turn to be a self-satisfied and integrous people by maintaining the criteria of communicative ethics comprising the priority of well-being of others, empathy, and situational morality.
ISSN:2676-699X
2716-9928