Ethics and history: Moral progress in Marx, Dostoevsky and Camus (Karl Marx, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus, Russia, France)

The dissertation examines the ethical dimension of both literary and philosophical texts and their relationship to the dominant moral and ideological practices in the cultural context in which they are written. Drawing on recent discussions of psychic trauma in psychoanalysis and Marxian concepts of moral and historical progress, the role of socio-cultural change in the development of alternative moral and political concepts in literature and philosophy is examined. In the analysis, historical conflict and social contradictions are viewed as the basis of collective forms of psychic trauma which disrupt both the reliability of the narrative voice in the novels examined and the consistency of the ethical positions which find expression in the narratives themselves. Analyzing these narratives as symptomatic representations of underlying forces of historical conflict, and as ethical responses to historical transformation, the dissertation studies how their status as social and biographical documents interacts with their status as literary works. Applying the methodology developed in the first chapter to literary analysis, the second chapter interrogates Dostoevsky's treatment of nihilism in Demons and demonstrates how the novel seeks to resolve the traumatic social events taking place in Russian society through a religious mode of understanding. In the following two chapters, an analysis of ethical foundations of Marxism and its treatment of social justice is utilized to develop a theory of materialist ethics. This theory is applied to a reading of Camus' The Fall by examining the relationship between the unreliability of the narrative voice and the moral crisis which centers upon the problem of social justice. Not simply a testimony of modern despair and cynicism, The Fall represents an interrogation of the concept of justice itself, an interrogation which focuses upon the radical discontinuity between the idea of justice and its practical reality. In examining both literature and political philosophy, the dissertation demonstrates the role which each plays in representing crucial turning points in human history as well as the part which they play in creating alternative forms of moral and cultural meaning.