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    John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy

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    Author(s)
    Jourdan, Phil
    Collection
    ScholarLed
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    John Gardner’s career was permanently changed by his publication of On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who found his conservatism suspicious or simply irrelevant. In this short tribute to Gardner’s late intellectual concerns, Phil Jourdan looks at some of the difficulties in On Moral Fiction, and asks whether Gardner was rigorous enough in his deployment of various philosophical concepts through his book. Convinced that, despite any problems of argumentative method or intellectual honesty, On Moral Fiction‘s basic message should not be dismissed outright, Jourdan tries to determine what is superfluous to the book, so that we may focus on its core: a call for writers not to forget their moral influence on readers. Now that Gardner’s career is half-forgotten, it is worth remembering this impassioned and public debate on the role of literature has been around far longer than we care to pretend: throughout the centuries, as literature attempts to define itself over and over, the question of morality is always lurking in the background. In John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy, Phil Jourdan tries to separate the man from the argument, and insists that the latter should not be dismissed because of the imperfection of the former.
    URI
    http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25602
    Keywords
    John Gardner; eulogy; creative writing; philosophy of fiction; ethics
    DOI
    10.21983/P3.0013.1.00
    ISBN
    9780615734514
    OCN
    945782487
    Publisher
    punctum books
    Publisher website
    https://punctumbooks.com/
    Publication date and place
    Brooklyn, NY, 2012
    Classification
    Ethics & moral philosophy
    Pages
    60
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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