Literature and the formation of character

Dr David Aldridge, Brunel University London
Professor Robert A. Davis, University of Glasgow
Aristotelian character education emphasises the central value of literary works to the project of moral formation. In particular, there has been renewed enthusiasm for the potential contribution of European feudal cultural practices and values to the tasks of moral education. To date the academic literature of character education has paid insufficient attention to the relation of literary works to literary traditions, and to philosophical accounts of the ways in which literature is understood. In light of this, Davis and Aldridge present two connected parts of a critique that draws on hermeneutics and literary theory.

Aldridge argues that while character educators have focused on the psychological implications of the Aristotelian process of emulation, they have not paid attention to hermeneutical considerations around how an exemplar is understood as such; his paper draws out the implications for moral education of recognising that an exemplar is dialogically constituted in an event of understanding.

Discussing both Iberian and American representations of the medieval past, Davis argues that the embrace of any past moral and literary formalism must be robustly historicised if the full extent of its cultural ancestry, and its highly ambivalent moral resonance for us  today, is to be properly understood and effectively taught.