Thursday
My dear friend and former colleague Jackie Paskow has just alerted me to a couple of books that sound a bit like the book I’m just completing. This can either be a good thing (“Great, my topic is of interest to people!”) or a bad thing (“Oh no, others have gotten there first!”). In reading Louis Menard’s New Yorker review, however, I’ve concluded that my book is different enough that it still has a chance in the publishing world.
The two books are Roosevelt Montas’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein’s The Lives of Literature: Read, Teaching, Knowing.
Menard describes such books as follows:
The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author’s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of “It’s all gone to hell.” Montás’s and Weinstein’s books fall into the “It’s all gone to hell” category. Other books that fall within the genre, Menard says, are Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study (1894), Irving Babbitt’s Literature and the American College (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1936), Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014). All these works, Menard says, complain that “higher education has lost its soul,” to which he adds, “It’s a song that never ends.”
Whether or not higher education has lost its soul, it’s true that the purpose of the university has flipped. Menard explains this as follows:
In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.
The so-called great books courses, then, have been devised to address this new reality. They are, as Montas puts it, “pointedly countercultural,” aiming to balance out the “knowledge factory” that colleges have become. But given that this seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of literature, why are these guys complaining? As Menard points out,
At this point, great-books-type courses—that is, courses where the focus is on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training—are part of the higher-education landscape. Few colleges require them, but many colleges happily offer them. The quarrel between generalist and specialist—or, as it is sometimes framed down in the trenches, between dilettante and pedant—is more than a hundred years old and it would seem that this is not a quarrel that one side has to win.
As I was reading the review, one point stood out since it sounds like what I aspire to, both in my teaching and in my blog. Here it is:
In a great-books course of the kind that Montás and Weinstein teach, undergraduates read primary texts, then meet in a classroom to share their responses with their peers. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. (emphasis mine)
So do Montas and Weinstein do this? How much into the weeds of their students’ lives do they go? Regular readers of this blog know that I’m willing to go fairly far. Over the past 12 years I’ve given numerous examples of my students using great books to sort out vital life questions, from confronting war trauma and processing sexual abuse to seeing teammates commit college vandalism (this latter in an essay on Rime of the Ancient Mariner). If Montas and Weinstein include such exploring in their books, more power to them. But according to the Menard review, they stay at a more abstract level, preferring to talk about the examined life:
What humanists should be teaching, Montás and Weinstein believe, is self-knowledge. To “know thyself” is the proper goal. Art and literature, as Weinstein puts it, “are intended for personal use, not in the self-help sense but as mirrors, as entryways into who we ourselves are or might be.” Montás says, “A teacher in the humanities can give students no greater gift than the revelation of the self as a primary object of lifelong investigation.”
To which, my instant response is, “What’s wrong with using literature in a self-help sense?” I agree with Menard when he rips them apart for their vagueness:
And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?
Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quaint-thinking. “The value of the thing,” Montás explains, about liberal education, “cannot be extracted and delivered apart from the experience of the thing.” Literature’s bottom line, Weinstein says, is that it has no bottom line. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”
Menard also criticizes the two for seeing themselves superior to the other disciplines:
A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.
And then, taking Montas and Menard down another peg, Menard concludes:
The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person.
While I agree with Menard that lit professors are not “the wisest and most humane people on earth” and appreciate his not wanting to be holier than thou, I take issue with his concluding statement. I think that great literature can make you a better person, in part by plopping us in the middle of big issues and showing us what comes of good choices and of bad choices. While literature is not the only way to teach empathy, it is a particularly powerful way to do so, as various psychological studies have shown. Some social psychologists I know use novels in their classes for just this reason.
As far as whether literature can make you a better person, many great thinkers have argued that it does and have explained how. In my book, I profile some who have done so, including Aristotle (but not Plato), Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, F. R. Leavis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum. What may distinguish these figures from Weinstein and Montas—I don’t know for sure, not having read the latter—is their specificity. They show how literature mixes it up with everyday life.
Do I think that only literature can do this? Certainly not. But I think it is a particularly powerful tool that imparts knowledge in a way not accessible to other disciplines and other arts. While I don’t believe in making a quasi-religion out of great literature, I think that people miss out on a great way of improving their lives when they don’t read it.