Business Ethics Through Literature, University of Virginia (Darden)

The purpose of this course is to deepen students’ understanding of the role of ethics in management. The course builds on the conversations begun in the First Year Business Ethics course and addresses several key themes of interest for contemporary managers. Among the issues discussed are: the definition of success in business, race, gender, and the role of culture, the privileged place of the executive, and new understandings and models of what it means to be a human being. The course uses Socratic method to explore fictional novels and short stories as texts. Fiction affects us emotionally and allows us to see particularity and complexity within universally recognizable situations. Characters are multifaceted, and plots are multi-layered, which provides fertile ground for discussion. Reading these texts from a new perspective can impact a greater understanding of people and events in the empirical world. Students will explore certain aspects of contemporary literary theory and learn to perform close readings with the objective of deepening their understanding and ability to read complex texts. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.