SOURCE: Plotz, John. “A Sympathetic Social Science.” Novel 30, no. 1 (fall 1996): 132-34.

In the following review, Plotz asserts that Poetic Justice is persuasive and tremendously thought-provoking. Plotz, however, points out various flaws in Nussbaum's arguments, and contends that she fails to adequately develop the implications of her central ideas.

Charles Dickens begins Bleak House with a lament that establishes the central importance of sympathy to the nineteenth-century novel: “nobody knew about Miss Flite, because nobody cared.” When he goes on to recount Miss Flite's fate—and Jo's death, and all the rest—in sometimes excruciating physical and emotional detail, the novel delivers what it calls for: nine hundred pages of caring. The reader proceeds, via an initial sympathy, to the knowledge that in turn ensures a deeper sympathy.

In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum goes to bat for Dickens, arguing that knowledge sometimes is not really knowledge unless it proceeds...