Introduction: Cultivating Humanity with Martha Nussbaum

The vast, ever-growing corpus of Martha C. Nussbaum’s work ranges over legal study, moral philosophy, political theory, classical studies, educational policy, and literature. This makes it sound as if she is one of those contemporary thinkers who ignores disciplinary boundaries as just so many obstacles to making half-baked pronouncements on anything and everything. Nussbaum’s most impressive quality, however, is precisely that she undertakes to master each subject-area with which she engages. As a result she can develop lines of thought that are genuinely cross-disciplinary, in the sense that considering a topic or (in the case of literature) reading a work in the context of a different framework will produce new ideas that are both substantive and suggestive. They can be considered, debated, re-imagined, extended—as we can see in this group of essays.

Nussbaum established her reputation with The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986, 2nd ed. 2001), a philosophically broad and philologically minute analysis of moral thought in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greece. What may be most striking about this remarkable work is that, alongside Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Euripides are treated as full partners in an ongoing investigation of the nature of human well-being, its attainment as well as the threats and obstacles to it. In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), she took this approach a step further, by treating novelists like Dickens, James, Beckett, and Proust as interlocutors in modern philosophical debates on ethics. But this collection also challenges literary critics, since it argues not only that literary works have a role in moral reflection, but that, conversely, literary study—and specifically literary theory—must broaden its scope to include moral philosophy.

While these are the volumes that have had a clear impact in the literary humanities, Nussbaum has hardly abandoned work on literature. On the contrary, a survey of her publications over the past twenty-five years would include essays, chapters, and discussions of writings by Richard Wright, Emily Brontë, Dante, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell, Alan Paton, Shakespeare, Anthony Trollope, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf (among others!). The largest concentration of these treatments appear in what is perhaps her magnum opus, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), in which Nussbaum undertakes to demonstrate that emotional response, far from being antithetical to rationality, as the philosophical tradition has tended to hold, in fact makes an essential contribution to it. This book, along with her inquiries on topics such as human capabilities, social justice, and what might be called general anthropology (that is, philosophical reflection on what humanity is), has yet to be extensively addressed by critics and theorists in the humanities. This is just to say that the conversation between Nussbaum and students of literature is only getting started.

The essayists in this special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies continue that conversation in a variety of new and insightful ways. In “Reading Responsibly between Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel Levinas: Towards a Textual Ethics for the Twenty-First Century,” John Wrighton identifies the “turn to ethics” as emanating from two distinct camps, a neo-Aristotelian, narrative-driven ethics and an Other-oriented, deconstructive ethical perspective. For Wrighton, these dualities represent a “productive tension” between Nussbaum, the analytical philosopher, and Continental philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. By demonstrating Nussbaum and Levinas’s competing textual encounters with literature and Otherness, Wrighton proposes a twenty-first century ethical criticism that accents the values of community and social possibility. In “Beyond Martha Nussbaum’s Cognitive-Evaluative Approach to the Emotions: Separating Reader and Narrative Affective Experience from Ethical Judgments in Lolita,” Lindsay Martin applies Nussbaum’s ethical philosophy to a reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In an innovative interpretation of the notorious 1955 novel, Martin explores the ways in which Nussbaum’s philosophy of emotional engagement come into revealing conflict with Nabokov’s depiction of his diabolical narrator Humbert Humbert. In Martin’s estimation, Nabokov’s establishment of a fuzzy, “emotionless” mood challenges the emotional specificity that Nussbaum’s...