A Study On Martha Nussbaum's Literary Ethical Criticism

Martha C.Nussbaum is one of the outstanding American women philosophers and thinkers.And she is also one of the representatives of Western ethical criticism.Maverick experience and multidisciplinary education background make her skilled in using literary texts in interdisciplinary research.These mainly express at two aspects:she deeply mines ethical and philosophical connotations of literary texts,and she is trying to make literature participate in public life.The body of the paper is divided into three parts.Chapter one introduces the academic road of Nussbaum,including her growth,education and work experiences;Nussbaum's theoretical sources in literature and ethics;and Nussbaum's academic contributions in the areas of Justice,education and women's issues.Chapter two respectively introduces Nussbaum's literature view and ethics view.Nussbaum pays attention to the imagic property of literary texts,and she believes that readers can use literature to guide their lives by this particularity.Especially we should improve the readers' imagination and emotion ability.In the area of ethics,Nussbaum is mainly anti-utilitarianism,and her ideal is cosmopolitanism.At the same time,thinking on the relationship between literature and ethics is answer to the legitimacy of literary ethical criticism.Chapter three investigates the practice of Nussbaum's ethical literary criticism.I think her criticism has three main features:firstly,she's good at studying literary texts and ethical themes together;secondly,she advocates that literature should intervene in daily public life;thirdly,she attaches importance to the connection of contentual criticism and formal criticism.Nussbaum's ethical literary criticism has attracted the attention of Western scholars for a long time.For our Chinese contemporary literary theory,there are also many reference points.However,everything has its shorts.Therefore,weakness of Nussbaum's criticism has also been talked in the end.