The chapter explores Iris Murdoch’s engagement with Buddhist worldview offered by one of her most acclaimed and philosophically sophisticated novels, whose diegetic core rehearses a number of Buddhist tenets by inscribing them within the fictional fabric of a sympathetic and simultaneously ironical postmodern aesthetics. It argues that Murdoch’s anti-dogmatic Buddhism is deeply woven into the rhetorical grain of her narrative and that, in such terms, it provides a revision of Western humanism by re-launching the Anglo-Saxon debate on moral philosophy against the predominance of Kantian rationalism and utilitarian logic at work in mainstream liberal thought, thus leading the discourse from morality – the domain of obligatory action – to the wider field of ethics, which embraces the question of good and goodness beyond the immediate realm of practical action and human well-being.

Spandri, E.A. (2013). The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. In A.W. Lawrence Normand (a cura di), Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (pp. 175-191). London : Bloomsbury.

The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea

SPANDRI, ELENA ANNA
2013-01-01

Abstract

The chapter explores Iris Murdoch’s engagement with Buddhist worldview offered by one of her most acclaimed and philosophically sophisticated novels, whose diegetic core rehearses a number of Buddhist tenets by inscribing them within the fictional fabric of a sympathetic and simultaneously ironical postmodern aesthetics. It argues that Murdoch’s anti-dogmatic Buddhism is deeply woven into the rhetorical grain of her narrative and that, in such terms, it provides a revision of Western humanism by re-launching the Anglo-Saxon debate on moral philosophy against the predominance of Kantian rationalism and utilitarian logic at work in mainstream liberal thought, thus leading the discourse from morality – the domain of obligatory action – to the wider field of ethics, which embraces the question of good and goodness beyond the immediate realm of practical action and human well-being.
2013
978-1-4411-8476-4
Spandri, E.A. (2013). The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. In A.W. Lawrence Normand (a cura di), Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (pp. 175-191). London : Bloomsbury.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11365/21554