Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales
In his article “Awakening the Moral Imagination,” Vigen Guroian discusses the role that fairy tales plays in moral formation. The multi-dimensional world of the fairy tale has the capacity to depict a compelling vision of what is good and evil without reducing moral formation to mere instruction and the moral imagination to advanced utilitarian reasoning skills. In this essay, Guroian also contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation.
This article was originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1996. Read by Ken Myers. 47 minutes.
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