The architecture of ethics in postmodern fiction

My project demands that contemporary critics and theorists seriously reconsider the ethical concerns of postmodernism. While many critics and defenders of postmodernism suggest that postmodernism is post-ethical, I am arguing that postmodernism should be understood as a collection of shared ethical concerns that are evident across the disciplines. These concerns include the treatment of the natural environment, sex and racial prejudice, economic disparity, and basic human rights. These ethical concerns have a history of treatment in moral philosophy; however, they are given specificity at the end of the twentieth century because of an emphasis on the socially constructed self. This focus allows for a new way to look at ethics that takes into account that rules and values are socially negotiated rather than fixed.;In order to make this interdisciplinary argument from my perspective as a student of literature, I use architectural theory to assist my reading of postmodern fiction. I do so because architectural theory highlights the influence of space and environment on the construction of the self and on the relation of self to society. Therefore, looking at architecture and space using the methods discussed in postmodern architectural theory will make clear the way postmodern novelists are constructing ethical space in a postmodern society.