Consuming the Fruits of One’s Own Actions

Abstract

Abstract Together the chapters in Part II argue that preta narratives construct and model an aesthetically informed affective process of ethical cultivation in which the generation of ethical selves corresponds to the cultivation of ideal bodies. Preta stories construct what Susanne Mrozik terms a “physio-moral discourse” that casts bodies as sites for practicing, performing, and fashioning ethical selves and closely ties moral and physical transformation. As a result, preta tales help constitute hierarchies of human embodied difference in relation to class, caste, gender, and sexuality, even as they destabilize these same hierarchies. This process of embodied ethical transformation is inherently tied to the affective ethos modeled and produced in narrative literature. Preta stories model and elicit aesthetically informed affective embodied experiences that are themselves educational and ethically formative. The production of affective dispositions in these texts at once reinforce hierarchical somatic discourses while destabilizing them altogether.