Fred writes:

As I continue to pursue my interest in Rene Girard, I have found a fascinating article relating his work to Richard Rorty. Here's a paragraph that suggests a whole new approach to ICS-character playing exercises:

[T]he names of Dickens's characters take the place of moral principles and of lists of virtues and vices. They do so by permitting us to describe each other as "a Skimpole," "a Mr. Pickwick," "a Gradgrind," "a Mrs. Jellyby," "a Florence Dombey." In a moral world based on what Kundera calls "the wisdom of the novel," moral comparisons and judgments would be made with the help of proper names rather than general terms or general principles. A society which took its moral vocabulary from novels rather than from ontotheological or ontico-moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human nature, the point of human existence, or the meaning of human life. Rather, it would ask itself what we can do so as to get along with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be comfortable with one another, how institutions can be changed so that everyone's right to be understood has a better chance of being gratified. (78)

The URL for this extensive analysis is:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3777/is_200307/ai_n9277742/