Friday
Yesterday I had my first interview with a potential publisher for Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. It’s the book I’ve been working on for the past ten years, and in a zoom call from London the editor suggested that I set up groupings for the various theorists and schools that I survey. It took a while but I came up the following.
As a bonus, I throw in the quotations I use to introduce each theory chapter. They’ll give you a sense of what I’m up to.
Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate
Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living.—Bertolt Brecht
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Better Living through Literature—in Theory
A. Hardwired for Story
Prehistory: Telling Stories to Ensure Species Success
[F]iction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.—Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Psychological Studies: Literature’s Impact upon the Brain
At a minimum, we can say that reading stories— those with strong narrative arcs—reconfigures brain networks for at least a few days. [The study] shows how stories can stay with us. This may have profound implications for children and the role of reading in shaping their brains.–Gregory S. Berns, director, Emory University Center for Neuropolicy
B. The Debate Begins
Plato: Poetry, a Threat to Justice and Virtue
All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers…– Plato, The Republic (c. 375 BCE)
Aristotle: Poetry, Truer Than History
Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal, I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity…–Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 BCE)
Horace: Instructing While Delighting
The tribes of the seniors rail against everything that is void of edification: the exalted knights [young men] disregard poems which are austere. He who joins the instructive with the agreeable, carries off every vote, by delighting and at the same time admonishing the reader.–Horace, Ars Poetica (c. 19 BCE)
C. Literature Takes on a Moral Mission
Sir Philip Sidney: Poetry as a Guide to Virtue
So that the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest; …the poet is worthy to have it before any other competitors. –Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy
Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare as a Faithful Mirror of Manners and Life
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life…–Samuel Johnson, “Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare”
D. Literature Takes on a Social Mission
Romantics vs. Utilitarians: Connecting through the Poetic Imagination
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
From Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry as a Force for Liberation
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Literature as a Portrayal of Real Conditions
I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together. – Friedrich Engels
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung: Literature as a Blueprint for Self-Mastery
[O]ur actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.–Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
Matthew Arnold: Poetry as Civilization’s Savior
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. – Matthew Arnold
Hans Robert Jauss: Literature That Expands Horizons
A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time…A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue…Hans Robert Jauss
E. Diversity Changes the Conversation
W. E. B. Du Bois: Literature’s Hidden Biases
We can afford the Truth. White folk today cannot.—W. E. B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art
Bertolt Brecht: Art as a Hammer to Shape Reality
It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.–Bertolt Brecht
Frantz Fanon: Post-Colonial Literature, a Form of Combat
This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.– Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
The Frankfurt School: Great Literature Protests One-Dimensional Society
Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. —Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Literary Endings: Marriage or Death
Once upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social—successful courtship, marriage—or judgmental of her sexual and social failure—death.—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending
F. Literature as Training Ground for Citizenship
Terry Eagleton: Literature and Classroom Socialization
In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation.—Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch: Literature as Essential Being
Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time because then they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives.—Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Wayne Booth: The Best Books Build Character
You [literature] lead me first to practice ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than I am likely to meet anywhere else in the world. You correct my faults, rebuke my insensitivities. You mold me into patterns of longing and fulfillment that make my ordinary dreams seem petty and absurd. You finally show what life can be…to anyone who is willing to work to earn the title of equal and true friend.—Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction
Martha Nussbaum: Literature, Indispensable to Democracy
Narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s interest—with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility.—Martha Nussbaum, “Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education”
Part III – Better Living through Literature—in Practice
Case Study: How Jane Eyre Has Made the World a Better Place
Jane Austen on Pop Lit: Enjoy but Be Wary
Assessing Literature’s Personal Impact
Conclusion
