Egyptian Scribbles: The Usefulness of Literature??

Wednesday, 31 October 2007

The Usefulness of Literature??

I went to a very enjoyable Proust reading group this evening. The guy who was running it is working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature and had given some good thought to why he is pursuing a career in literary academia. All my old concerns and thoughts returned to me: why literature mattered, how anyone could justify a life studying and teaching fictional works. What he said really made me stop and think: We had been arguing for a while about the ‘usefulness’ of literature, but he paused and said that he had no problem with its lack of utility. In fact, he fully embraced the fact that literature was ‘useless’ and in no way integral to the process of staying alive. He wanted to teach literature precisely because it was viewed as useless within a capitalist society. He wanted to teach his students to stop and think and to spend hours reading just a few pages. He wanted to show them that life wasn’t all about making money and meeting deadlines. It was, more importantly, about learning to relate to other people and to spend time listening and empathizing. He believed this skill could be acquired through the process of reading (good literature) in a slow and deliberate manner. So, yet again, I find myself missing my academic life and wondering if I should return to a more creative path, or at least to a teaching career. Because I also deeply believe that people need to slow down and to spend more time really appreciating the interconnectedness of human beings, whatever their race, religion, nationality, gender….

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Interconnectedness of people CANNOT be found in literature. What activity is more solitary than reading? I'm all for embracing the human touch in our culture - slowing down to appreciate the relationships we are fortunate enough to have - but literature is not the path. It isn't real. How can you expect to become aware of real emotions, real people, if you immerse yourself in the purely fictional world of another person's novel?; 18 November 2007 at 04:36

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."