The Ethos of Narrative: Telling/Writing, Listening/Reading, Communication, and Caring
Patrocinio Schweickart | Purdue University
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 4
Excerpt | My main research interest lies in the field of theories of reading and reader-response. Being a feminist scholar, I am also interested in research in all fields that show how the perspectives and experiences of women can bring to light important aspects that have been obscured or underestimated by prevailing androcentric theories. Specifically, I argue that there is a connection between reading and the ethic of care which feminist scholars have found in the moral deliberations of women, and that this connection has important implications for the social and cultural work done by narratives.
Key words | Narrative, Reading, Listening, Reception, Dialectical Thinking, Ethics of Care, Communicative Action, Moral Consciousness, Asymmetrical Relationships, Double-consciousness, Reader-response Theory, Feminist Ethics, Carol Gilligan, Jürgen Habermas, Nel Noddings
Patrocinio Schweickart (pschweic@purdue.edu) is Professor Emerita at Purdue University, USA, where she taught English and Women’s Studies. Her main research interests are gender and reading, and feminist revisions of Habermas’s theory of communicative action from the perspective of an ethic of care. She, along with Elizabeth Flynn, is the editor of Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Johns Hopkins UP, 1986) and Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (MLA, 2004). Her essay “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading” won the 1984 Florence Howe Award.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Schweickart, Patrocinio. “The Ethos of Narrative: Telling/Writing, Listening/Reading, Communication, and Caring.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 18 Sep. 2023, pp. 1.12–1.18, http://ellids.com/archives/2023/09/5.4-Forum-Schweickart.pdf.