Laura Colombino

Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics addresses the philosophical issues that lie at the heart of Ishiguro's fiction, shedding light on the moral condition of his characters - their sense of responsibility and pride in service, their attempts at self-determination and the value they assign to loyalty, love and friendship. Ethics in Ishiguro's work is structured around the tension between the limits of the characters' agency and their striving towards the good. Ishiguro's novels are shown to tackle fundamental questions posed by ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and modern Western ones, from Adam Smith through Jean-Paul Sartre to Martha Nussbaum. What is the human soul? What is dignity? What does it mean to be human? These issues are expressed in his narrative world through the universal and timeless language of myths, allegories and images that are both ancient and modern as well as cross-cultural.

Produktdetails

• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
• Verlag: Taylor & Francis; Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Dezember 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 440g
• ISBN-13: 9781032660677
• ISBN-10: 1032660678
• Artikelnr.: 71299715

Autorenporträt

Laura Colombino is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genova, Italy, and Member of the Academia Europaea. She has a longstanding focus on transdisciplinary studies, in particular, the relationship between writing and the visual arts; architectural spaces and their embodiment; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city; and, most recently, the nonhuman. She is the author of Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013). She has edited and coedited books on Ford Madox Ford (2009, 2013; Routledge, 2019) and sits on the editorial board of the Ford Madox Ford: Complete Works (Oxford University Press). She has published essays and articles on Victorian and modernist novelists and travel writers (Thomas Hardy, Robert Byron, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley), contemporary writers (especially Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard and Ian Sinclair) and visual artists (Massimiliano Pelletti and Lee Bul). Most recently, she has written a chapter for A Companion to Charles Dickens, Second Edition (forthcoming) and another for The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (2023).

Inhaltsangabe

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Ishiguro's ethical, existential and emotional worlds
1. What is a Good Life? The Remains of the Day as an aporetic dialogue on
dignity
2. Wounded Idealists Travel the World: Anxiety, Responsibility and
Retribution in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans
3. Not at Home in the World: Longing for the Possible and Caring for the
Other in Never Let Me Go
4. Ethics, Myth and the Narrative Voice in The Buried Giant
5. The Soul's Desire for the Good: Heliotropic Mythology and Anamorphic
Mirrors in Klara and the Sun
Coda: Ethics and the Arena of Conflicting Emotions
Index

Rezensionen

Deftly exploring its philosophical underpinnings, Laura Colombino's incisive study addresses a central question in Ishiguro's work: how to live ethically in a politically perilous and psychologically obdurate world. Colombino offers a profound meditation on Ishiguro's career-long unflinching investigation of this most compelling of unresolved questions.

- Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK

Laura Colombino's Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics is a rich and indispensable work for all those who, working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, want to explore the ethical questions and dilemmas posed by the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. Covering virtually the entirety of Ishiguro's work to date, it is a rare combination of thematic depth, precision of thought, and a delightful attention to the stylistic specificities of one of our greatest living writers. It is deeply original and a pleasure to read. I can't recommend it enough.

- Miguel de Beistegui, ICREA Professor of Philosophy, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

... no previous study has tackled these questions with such range, such depth, such focus and such elegance as Colombino's; if others have gestured towards the ethical impasses of Ishiguro's morally fractious worlds, her deft and intellectually agile book provides the definitive handbook to Ishiguro and philosophy ... The book is insightful, engagingly written, and most importantly articulates with great delicacy some of the unspoken conceptual and emotional subtleties of some of the most important novels in the contemporary canon.

- Peter Sloane, English Studies