It is hardly controversial to suggest that literature develops our
powers of imagination. Literature invites us to explore times, places and modes
of experience that would otherwise be beyond our reach. But because we are
living in an age where only what produces calculable short-term profit is
recognized as useful, literary scholars frequently have to answer the following
questions: What use is imagination and why study something that is merely
fictional? Scholars across disciplines have responded to this challenge and
stood up to defend the value of literature and literary studies in the
contemporary world. One of the most famous of these recent defenses is
philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Not for
Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). Nussbaum argues that
literature is invaluable for democracies because it cultivates our “narrative
imagination”, which she defines as “the ability to think what it might be like
to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent
reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and
desires that someone so placed might have”.-

I agree that narrative
imagination is crucial to the ethical potential of literature, but I approach
this issue from a different angle, namely not from the perspective of
neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, like Nussbaum, but rather from the perspective
of narrative hermeneutics. While hermeneutics refers to theoretical reflection on
the phenomenon of interpretation, narrative hermeneutics approaches narrative
as a form and practice of interpretation.- It suggests that not only do we interpret
narratives but that narratives themselves – and literary narratives in
particular – are forms of interpretation: they are about interpreting human
possibilities and modes of being in the world. In this chapter, I
will first briefly outline such a hermeneutic approach; after that I will
enumerate, from the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, what I see as six
central aspects of the ethical potential of literature.-