Department of Comparative Literature

Does art – literature – have a place in the ethical life? Can it practice moral formation? Moral philosophers from the nineteenth century through the modern era have answered both questions in the affirmative. In this paper, I argue that several of the former, such as G. E. Moore and Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to use distinctively modern narrative strategies to morally form their readers. To establish a vocabulary useful in explaining how and to what end they did so, a brief exposition of contemporary virtue theorists opens the paper. Analyses of each writer follow; first, Mann relies on irony, emotional and deliberative narration, and the sublime to provoke the reader into confronting their biases on ethical-aesthetic problems throughout Death in Venice. Woolf creates ordinary “common meeting-places” and uses stream-of-consciousness narration to engender readers’ sympathy in “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Despite those strategic differences, however, both draw their readers into morally valent individual psychological realities without trying to destroy them. In this way, their texts are capable of re-creating the reader as “finely aware and richly responsible,” a faculty which I then situate in late modernity’s nascent discomfort with and inability to disavow grand narratives. The paper concludes that Woolf and Mann’s formative modernism is a critical midpoint between modernity and poststructuralist postmodernity.