Professor Helen Small: List of publications

This 'Credo' essay responds to the Contested Terms Forum (Issue 6), exploring why the language used about ageing gives rise to arguments, and examining the particular pressures placed on academic and broader public discourse by geography, regionality, cultural context and, not least, age. Drawing on Deborah Cameron's thinking about 'verbal hygiene', as it sheds light on the social context of all language use and the inevitability of divergent views about 'norms', the essay probes particular points of pressure on discourses of ageing at present. Two recent publications, Wendy Mitchell's What I Wish People Knew about Dementia (2022) and Pope Lonergan's I'll Die After Bingo (also 2022), help to unpack the importance of flexible attitudes to language within care settings. The essay then considers the focus on language as a defining feature of Humanistic study—an element of its critical 'deformation' (in the neutral sociological sense) by contrast with the Social and Medical Sciences. Attention is also given to the forms of flexibility required by literary criticism in its dealings with texts, which will often have historic, dramatic, psychological, emotional or other rationales for employing language that would rightly be rebuked in real-world social settings.

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct.

The contributors to this volume highlight dimensions that have hitherto received only scant attention and in doing so they aim to draw on the aesthetic capabilities of Trollope's twenty-first-century readers.

In The Value of the Humanities prize-winning critic Helen Small assesses the value of the Humanities, eloquently examining five historical arguments in defence of the Humanities.

The standard claim made for literary examples in moral philosophy is that they assist moral reasoning by offering appropriately complex descriptions of the conditions under which moral decisions are made or might plausibly be made. This essay offers a critical examination of that claim, exploring the attractions of literary exemplarity for moral philosophy of several kinds since the 1960s but also the constrained terms under which the invitation to deep reflectiveness is permitted to operate. The essay then considers why many recent moral philosophers (with the partial exception of Bernard Williams) have preferred quasi- or faux-literary examples, developing a kind of stripped-down or gestural literariness that offers the benefits of just enough, not too much, complexity.

<p>Extract: IT IS A STRIKING TRAIT of many Trollope protagonists, Stephen Wall observes in his fine study <em>Trollope and Character</em>, that they act ‘against self-interest’. They are capable of discerning what it would be best for them to do, in the sense that it would tend to promote their worldly advantage or their personal happiness, but how they behave is not in accordance with that judgement. Their acting so disadvantageously to themselves, in ways that are not explained by alternative calculations or even clear emotional imperatives, has, moreover, a vital bearing on the reader's apprehension of their ‘reality’. ‘Casualties of their own wills’ as they are, in Wall's deft phrase (p. 57), their propensity for self-sabotage confirms Trollope's ‘intense respect for the[ir] experience’: they ‘liv[e] in his mind’ in a way that ‘seems to preclude any thought of … ethical or rhetorical exploitation by the novelist’ (pp. 57, 61).</p> <p>To argue so is, up to a point, to say something familiarly within the traditions of description for classic realism. Characters impress us with their reality in so far as they establish their singularity, escaping or pre-empting the characterological straitjackets of genre, mode, stereotype, and moral formula. In Trollope's most persuasive endeavours at rendering ‘the authenticity of presence’ (p. 76) there is a touch of that quality Auerbach admired in Flaubert: a sense of something ‘unget-at-able’ in an individual nature, troubling the character him or herself and reinforced by the writer's more or less resigned awareness that literary representation cannot (should not?) hope to do better than the character themselves in this respect, and must accept the ‘hopelessly inexplicable’ aspects of motive (p. 76). This is, Wall suggests, largely what we mean by respect for the autonomy of others: accepting the impossibility of subduing them, in art as …</p>

Firstly, through photography's unprecedented reportorial role, photography diminishes the requirement, as in realist painting, to encode anti-bourgeois meaning through the reordering or displacement of bourgeois appearances; and secondly