What Literary Universals Are and What Culture Is Not: The Example of Descriptive Ethics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most of us would like to think that our ideas and commitments develop in a purely “objective” manner, as if they were the product of simple chains of evidence and inference. But that would be wrong. Our intellectual lives are more contingent and personal than that. In keeping with the biographical background of our intellectual engagements and commitments, the following article begins with a sort of memoir treating some key features of the author’s theoretical and scholarly development. This leads to a discussion of one prominent concern that has been a recurrent focus of Hogan’s research and writing—literary universals, especially story universals. Isolating and explaining universals is a project that is mostly ignored by literary theorists today. Insofar as it is not ignored, it is widely misunderstood. This article attempts to correct some of this misunderstanding. Rather than anything universal, humanists today are particularly enthusiastic about the idea of culture, despite its vagueness and (at best) limited explanatory value. As knowledge about culture is widely seen as undermining the study of universals, the article then turns to some criticisms of culturalism. It concludes by treating the example of how story universals bear on and illuminate the descriptive study of ethics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.