Wednesday
I hope readers will forgive me for today’s post, which feels like cheating. I have received a promising nibble on the book I’ve been writing, excerpts of which I’ve shared with you from time to time. An editor, after seeing a description and then interviewing me via zoom, has been working with me to produce a formal proposal. Since I’ve been working on that, I didn’t have time to write today’s essay, so you’re getting part of the proposal instead. I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Incidentally, you can tell by the spelling that the publisher is British. Wish me luck.
Book proposal for Better Living through Literature:
A 2,500-Year-Old-Debate
Synopsis
Better Living through Literature aims to take readers through a fascinating survey of conversations that have been occurring since the time of Plato about literature’s life-changing power. Written in a witty, engaging and conversational style, the book highlights some of history’s great literary battles and controversies that are still relevant today. Starting with Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments over Homer and the Greek tragedians, it includes chapters on (among other thinkers) Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley’s defences of poetry; Marx and Freud’s reliance on literature; Du Bois’s concern about ‘art as propaganda’; feminism’s attacks on ‘the marriage plot’; and the culture wars of the 1990s. It then applies the theories by examining the impact that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has had on readers, and by looking at Jane Austen’s warnings about the negative effects of popular literature.
At the core of the book are accounts of how literature has made better the lives of both the featured theorists and everyday readers. Discussions of what Sophocles meant to Aristotle, Virgil to Sidney, Balzac to Marx and Engels, and Wordsworth to John Stuart Mill differentiate this book from other surveys of literature’s great theorists. Readers, meanwhile, will relate to stories of how people like them have found personal meaning in the classics. At the book’s core are three sets of paired questions:
– Can great literature in fact change individuals’ lives?
– If so, does it change them for the better or can it also change them for the worse?
– Can great literature change not only individuals but history itself?
– If so, is great literature necessarily progressive or can it have a conservative or even reactionary impact?
– Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and so-called popular or pop lit?
– If so, is great literature good for us and pop lit less good, if not outright bad?
While Better Living ultimately concludes that great literature, unlike most popular literature, can in fact change individual lives and history for the better, multiple examples and a survey of debates through the ages are necessary to fully appreciate how it does so.
The Outline
General Introduction
The introduction makes the case for studying literature from the perspective of how it has changed lives, and it surveys thinkers throughout history who have theorized about how it does so. I explain the selection process for choosing these particular thinkers and explore why literature’s behavior-changing potential has been understudied (the main reasons being because reading experiences vary from person to person and are hard to measure). Despite the variety, however, certain patterns emerge when one studies multiple thinkers and examines multiple examples.
Part One
1. ‘Hardwired for Story’ looks at the role stories have played in human evolution and how they register, according to scientific studies, upon the human brain.
– Prehistory: Telling Stories to Ensure Species Success
– Psychological Studies: Literature’s Impact upon the Brain
2. ‘The Debate Begins’ looks at the debate between Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle about whether literature is good or bad for us and how they, along with the Roman poet Horace, set the terms for many of the later discussions about literature’s impact.
– Plato: Poetry, a Threat to Justice and Virtue
– Aristotle: Poetry, Truer Than History
– Horace: Instructing While Delighting
3. ‘Literature as a Force for Moral Transformation’ looks at how Sir Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century and Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth see literature having an impact on public morality, sometimes positive, sometimes (as Johnson argues in his attack on novels like Tom Jones) negative.
– Sir Philip Sidney: Poetry as a Guide to Virtue
– Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare as a Faithful Mirror of Manners and Life
3. ‘Literature as a Force for Social Transformation’ looks at the society-changing potential that the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold saw in the creative Imagination and then examines the role literature played in shaping the social and psychological theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
– Romantics v. Utilitarians: Connecting through the Poetic Imagination
– Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry as a Force for Liberation
– Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Literature as a Portrayal of Real Conditions
– Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung: Literature as a Blueprint for Self-Mastery
– Matthew Arnold: Poetry as Civilization’s Saviour
– Hans Robert Jauss: Literature That Expands Horizons
4. ‘Literature as Activist Handbook’ looks at how twentieth-century political activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Frantz Fanon, the Frankfurt School and Rachel Blau DuPlessis conceived of literature in the struggle for human liberation, introducing and problematizing [AQ: clarify – what or who is introducing and problematizing these issues?] issues of race, class, colonialism, and gender.
– W. E. B. Du Bois: Literature’s Hidden Biases
– Bertolt Brecht: Art as a Hammer to Shape Reality
– Frantz Fanon: Post-Colonial Literature, a Form of Combat
– The Frankfurt School: Great Literature Challenges One-Dimensional Society
– Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Literary Endings: Marriage or Death
5. ‘Literature as Training Ground for Citizenship’ looks at the role English teachers play in socialization, explains (but does not defend) the critiques of multiculturalism by cultural conservatives, and lays out the cases made by literary theorist Wayne Booth and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how great literature helps readers negotiate the challenges posed by today’s world.
– Terry Eagleton: Literature and Classroom Socialization
– Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch: Literature as Essential Being
– Wayne Booth: The Best Books Build Character
– Martha Nussbaum: Literature, Indispensable to Democracy
Part Two
The second, much shorter half of the book contains two follow-up chapters where the theory is applied at length. It also has a chapter aimed directly at the reader.
6. ‘Has Jane Eyre Made the World a Better Place?’ looks at the impact that Brontë’s novel had both upon early readers and upon the 1970s feminist movement. I also contrast Jane Eyre with Stephenie Meyers’s pop gothic and teen sensation Twilight (2005–8).
7. ‘Jane Austen on Pop Lit: Enjoy but Be Wary’ begins with a general discussion of the issues surrounding popular literature, touches on three such novels that have had an outsized impact (Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and then examines Austen’s warnings about lesser lit.
8. ‘Assessing Literature’s Personal Impact’ walks readers through a process of active reflection, showing them how they can systematically assess the impact that intense reading experiences have had on their own lives.
Conclusion
The final chapter pulls together the questions the book has been exploring and, with the elaborations and complications that the various thinkers have contributed to the discussion, concludes that (1) yes, great literature has changed individual lives; (2) yes, it has at times impacted history itself; and (3) yes, great literature is better for us than popular literature.
