Ethics and Literary Worldmaking: Imaginative Discourse in Oral and Early Scribal Cultures

Considering poetry, narrative, and performances from diverse oral societies and the earliest scribal cultures, Ethics and Literary Worldmaking traces ways that both oral and written genres participate in communal shaping and reshaping of affectivity, sociality, deliberation, and evaluation.

The study views delineation and revision of shared imagined ＂worlds＂ as itself an evolutionary adaptive activity, one through which humans, like other species, adjust behavior and modify their environments to enhance their flourishing. Donald R. Wehrs argues that discursive heritages of oral societies from Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas not only delineate diverse ontologies but also seek to negotiate tensions between individual desires and communal interests, and disjunctions between what seems socially or prudentially optimal and what is felt to be right or just. The earliest scribal traditions, Sumerian and Akkadian poetry, draw on patterns of ethically charged worldmaking resembling those featured prominently in heterogeneous surviving oral traditions. Imaginative discourse, whether oral or written, returns incessantly to questioning egocentric and ethnocentric norms and self-privileging assumptions in ways that hierarchical, authoritarian societies cannot completely contain or co-opt.

Ethics and Literary Worldmaking establishes unexpected contexts for addressing literary theory and history relevant to humanities scholarship generally, particularly for those working on ethics and/or science and literature, literary theory, literary history, cognitive literary studies, or comparative studies, but also for teachers of world literature.

Donald R. Wehrs is Hargis Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Auburn University, USA. He is author of four monographs, most recently Ethical Sense and Literary Significance (2024), and editor or co-editor of six collections, including The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature (2025).