In moments of rupture—whether personal, political, or planetary—narratives frequently stage ethical crises that challenge and destabilize established frameworks of responsibility, relationality, and judgment. How do literature and film illuminate the fragile, often invisible networks of moral obligation that bind us to one another, particularly when these ties are strained by trauma, contingency, or crisis?

This seminar invites papers that investigate how narrative forms grapple with ethical responsibility amid unpredictability, focusing on how contingency reshapes moral action and reveals the persistent tensions between individual autonomy and collective obligation. What do we owe each other across chance encounters, asymmetrical relationships, or traumatic events? In what ways do texts make visible—or conceal—the ethical imperatives of witnessing, care, complicity, and silence?

We particularly welcome submissions that explore how literature and cinema renegotiate ethics in light of the Real, engaging with works such as Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Albert Camus’s The Plague, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, among others.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Narrative representations of guilt, complicity, and ethical failure
• Truth, lies, and the ethics of narration
• The ethics of memory and forgetting
• The ethics of violence and justice
• Ethics of witnessing, care, and relationality
• Ethics and the Real: Lacanian and psychoanalytic perspectives
• Ethics in times of crisis: pandemics, war, and catastrophe

We welcome contributions from all historical periods, geographic regions, and genres that engage these questions through literary and cinematic texts, as well as theoretical reflections that extend or challenge inherited ethical frameworks. Comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary approaches are especially encouraged.