In “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” (1937), the philosopher Charles Leslie Stevenson suggested that ethical terms weren’t merely expressive but prescriptive. In essence, the phrase “all reading is good” doesn’t just mean “I think all reading is good” but “I think all reading is good and you ought to as well.” Stevenson’s work was a precursor to the prescriptivism of R.M. Hare, who insisted that moral language was not only prescriptive but universalizing. These arguments for moral language being implicitly prescriptive or imperative don’t come up much anymore. But insofar as their history is inseparable from the development of close reading—from Stevenson's take on Richards's and Ogden's The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to Wimsatt and Beardsley's take on Stevenson in "The Affective Fallacy" (1949)—they also throw our critical practices into much needed relief. In this talk, I therefore examine these intertwined histories to take up the following question: why do close readers have so much trouble talking about morals?
Join the IHGC's Reading Lab for a talk by Joshua Gang! Joshua Gang is associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on twentieth century literature and criticism as framed by key problems in analytic philosophy. His book Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind was published by Johns Hopkins in 2021 and his essay “Derek Jarman and Everything That Is the Case,” which brings Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to bear on queer theory, appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2022. He has also published in journals such as ELH, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, PMLA, and Twentieth Century Literature. His talk today is drawn from a project tentatively titled Beautiful Errors: Moral Philosophy, Modern Fiction, and the Appeal to Aesthetics.