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Oser, Lee. The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 185 pp. £45.00/$80.00. ISBN 0–521–86725–8, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 95–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm148
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Contemplating his wife's adultery with “equanimity” towards the close of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom considers her betrayal: “As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with his, her and their natured natures” (Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al [London, 1993], p. 603 [17.2178–80]). Such reduplication of “nature” and its cognates looks like a joke against the person who appeals to “human nature” to excuse his conduct. But the seeming tautology of “natured nature” translates a theological term, natura naturata – the world as an effect of material causes (distinct from natura naturans – the supreme or essential being of the world). Bloom's “equanimity” couches pointed thinking about the link between human nature and ethical responsibilities. This is the subject of The Ethics of Modernism, which argues that the “moral project” of Modernists like Joyce was “to transform human nature through the use of art” (2). Thought-provoking chapters cover topics such as the links between Woolf's fictional renderings of consciousness and George Moore's Principia Ethica. The book concludes by reading Beckett's fictions as a warning against the delusions of teleological thinking. Oser's dense mix of philosophy and literary criticism is unlikely to appeal to undergraduates, but it covers important ground.
