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Die Ethik der Literatur: Deutsche Autoren der Gegenwart. Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler and Jennifer Kapczynski. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011. Pp. 287. Paper euro24.90. ISBN 978-3835308657.
Die Ethik der Literatur is a compilation of contributions to the twentieth St. Louis Symposium on German Language and Culture of the same name, organized in March 2010 by the volume's editors and attended by this reviewer. The St. Louis symposia, organized by faculty in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis on a biennial basis, are centered around topics in German literature and culture, with the 2010 symposium dedicated to exploring interrelationships between ethics and literature-including the question as to whether one can actually speak of an ethics particular to literature.
Paul Michael Lützeler states in his introduction, where he foregrounds the primacy of ethics for literature in general-"ohne gestaltetes moralisches Dilemma ist ein großes literarisches Werk nicht denkbar" (13)-and that of literature for ethics-"die ungelösten und oftunlösbaren Fragen der Ethik [blieben] das Gebiet der Literatur" (11-12)-that the goal of this symposium was not "den Themenbereich Ethik und Ästhetik philosophisch explizit zu klären," but "vielmehr sollte essayistisch mit den unterschiedlichen Möglichkeiten, die Kritik, Literatur und Germanistik zur Verfügung stehen, das Thema implizit angesprochen werden" (16). The desire to approach...