Title: What is Ethics of Storytelling? On the Complementary Relationship between Narrative Ethics and Ethical Literary Criticism
标题：什么是“讲故事”的伦理？兼论叙事伦理与文学伦理学批评的交融互鉴
Abstract: Storytelling is generally regarded as one of the fundamental human capabilities, which helps humans to draw a distinction between themselves and other species, and it is the human experience that both constitutes the stories told and enables humans to identify themselves. Thus, narrative discourse, usually in the disguise of storytelling, plays an irreplaceable role in organizing and representing either individual or collective experience in the human world. It is in this sense that humans are called homo narrans (John D. Niles) or storytelling animal (Alasdair MacIntyre, Jonathan Gottschall). When laments that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end,” and we less frequently “encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly”, he is mainly concerned with the dispossession of the ability to exchange experiences, while overlooking the fact that storytelling is ethically loaded. Though issue of storytelling and ethics remains a hot issue in contemporary narrative studies, to our regret, in those works by Wayne C. Booth, Adam Zachary Newton and James Phelan, ethical criticism has not eventually developed as a fully-fledged discipline. With the ethics of storytelling its point of departure, this paper will focus on the complementary relationship between narrative ethics and ethical literary criticism.
摘要：讲故事是人类特有的一种能力，也是人类与区别于其他动物的一个重要标记。人类的经验既构成了讲故事的主要内容，也是人类认识和建构自我身份的一个重要基础。由此，以讲故事为主要形式的叙事成为人类组织和再现个体经验与集体经验一种普遍方式。在这种意义上，约翰D.奈尔斯把人称作为“叙事人”(homo narrans），麦金太尔乔纳森·歌德夏把人看作是“讲故事的动物”(storytelling animal)。当瓦尔特·本雅明哀叹“讲故事的艺术行将消亡”，并指出“我们要遇见一个能够地地道道地讲好一个故事的人的机会越来越少”的时候，他只是意在强调经验匮乏对讲故事艺术的危害与影响，而忽略了讲故事行为自身之于传递故事价值、塑造受众的道德品行和道德感知的积极作用。尽管对讲故事的伦理的讨论一直是叙事学研究领域中一个热门话题，但遗憾的是，在隶属人文主义伦理阵营的韦恩·布思布斯、亚当·牛顿、詹姆斯·费伦等人那里，围绕故事与故事讲述的伦理批评被叙事学“收编”，并没有发展成为独立的批评体系。本文试图在阐明讲故事的伦理的基础上，重点论述叙事伦理与文学伦理学批评之间的交融互鉴性。
Bio: Biwu Shang is Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and editor-in-chief of the De Gruyter journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies (ESCI indexed). His research interests include contemporary British fiction, narratology, and ethical literary criticism. He is the author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011), Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives (People’s Literature Press, 2013), and Unnatural Narrative Across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Partial Answers, Neohelicon, Journal of Literary Semantics, Semiotica, Comparative Literature and Culture, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Arcadia, among other journals.