Narratology, as a discipline studying the semantic, syntactic, and stylistic features of narrative texts, expanded beyond literary criticism in the second half of the 20th century and began to be actively applied in the sciences related to values: ethics, historical studies, ethnology, political science, and psychology. In a narrative, chronologically consecutive events are linked by a metalogical connection. Plot or intrigue imbues the narrative judgments with additional teleological meaning, which is always linked to values, expectations, goals, and obligations. Today, narratology has become an element of cultural history and cultural constructivism. The author of this article attempts to understand the narrative construction of morality from the perspective of the general theory of construction. All phenomena and objects in their natural state undergo the most probable of possible changes, so that in any closed system left to the natural course of events, entropy (the average value of a random variable) increases. By interfering with the natural course of events, people achieve the occurrence of unlikely events and a local decrease in entropy. The established system of our moral values exhibits a similar tendency toward increasing entropy if it changes in a “natural” way. Externally, this entropy manifests itself as moral degradation and indifference. Only creativity, including narrative, can lift morality out of its state of entropy. It removes the events of our lives from their everyday context and disrupts stereotypes of their perception, which is the goal of all art.
Translated title of the contributionEthics of Reverse Mimesis. : Prolegomena to Moral Narratology
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)5 - 21
Number of pages17
JournalЭТИЧЕСКАЯ МЫСЛЬ
Volume26
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 Jul 2026

    Research areas

  • art, construction, hermeneutics, mimesis, morality, narrative, technique

    Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities(all)

ID: 159840904