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This article argues for the interest of a contemporary re-understanding of the ideal of informal self-formation through the relationship to cultural works and fictional imaginaries. We show how the imaginaries of ethics are now largely reconstructed in contact with widely distributed cultural works, which populate the private “media libraries” of individuals and support informal, but nonetheless decisive, self-formation. We are thus confronted with the following double question: How is our ethical personality constituted today in this new cultural framework, certainly in early education but also throughout life? And how can we substantially integrate into this first field of questioning another striking fact of hypermodernity—namely the access of the greatest number of people to a very wide range of cultural goods—which marks these same societies to an equally unprecedented extent? The first part of the article allows us then to specify the way in which we apprehend the coming together of the requirement of generalized moral autonomy and democratic culture in a radicalized modernity. This invites us, in order to think ethically about our time, to attempt an extension of the domain of works of formation, whose features we sketch out in the second part, while proposing methodological approaches to their study in research in ethics. A concluding section allows us to suggest a more holistic interpretive approach regarding the respective capacities of ethics and imagination to be authoritative today.