Moral Imagination : : Essays / / David Bromwich.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter PUP eBook-Package Pilot Project 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Bromwich, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- One -- Chapter 1. Moral Imagination -- Chapter 2. A Dissent on Cultural Identity -- Chapter 3. The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789 -- Two -- Chapter 4. Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans -- Chapter 5. Lincoln's Constitutional Necessity -- Chapter 6. Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Ambition -- Three -- Chapter 7. The American Psychosis -- Chapter 7. The American Psychosis -- Chapter 9. The Self-Deceptions of Empire -- Four -- Chapter 10. What Is the West? -- Chapter 11. Holy Terror and Civilized Terror -- Chapter 12. Comments on Perpetual War -- Index