The Value of Literature: Knowledge and Imagination (original) (raw)
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Literacy: The End and Means of Literature
Philosophical Investigations, 2004
In modern times a gap has appeared between the arts of history and literature, and the sciences of historicism and criticism. Many modern critics, historians, and teachers of literature and history (and even many so-called authors of literature) have welcomed, or at least complied with, the "scientification" of their arts, resulting in widespread illiteracy with regard to literature and history. The solution to this problem lies in a (re-)investigation of how the art of literature teaches us the truth. I maintain that the lifeblood of literature is the set of common joys and griefs, the common blessings and sufferings, of mankind. Without a communication of these passions as passions with the result of a transformation or shaping of the soul-without a mimesis, as the Greeks would say-across the boundaries of tribe, race, gender and era, there is no literature; and no literacy. Using a scene from Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, I argue that these passions are part of the truth (or falsity) of any story involving human beings. So literature and history would both be restored if the writers, readers, and teachers of each developed a deeper concern for the whole truth.
Literature as a Human Universal
in Grenzen der Literatur: Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, edited by Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, and Simone Winko (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009): 142-60.
The practice of making and consuming imaginative verbal artifacts appears in all known cultures. People all over the world, in all ecological and social conditions, play with the sounds and meanings of words, create imaginary worlds with intentional agents, goals, and symbolic images, and produce fantasy structures in which characters and events are linked in thematically significant ways to produce tonally modulated outcomes. All forms of cultural imagination—religious, ideological, artistic, and literary—are imbued with the passions derived from the evolved and adapted dispositions of human nature. Human action depends on the human sense of value and meaning. Literature and the other arts provide a means for making the value and meaning of experience available to the imagination.
The Value of Literature, Today and Tomorrow
Literature
While reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated, reports of the decline of Aestheticism, New Criticism, and the printed word are not. Literature as a critique of society is alive today, but to survive tomorrow in any form it will need to engage environmental, climate, and pandemic public health issues. Without such engagement, there will be no civilization, and, thus, no literature. Literature can survive now, but to thrive, essays in literary criticism may have to not only (i) continue to discuss canonical and (ii) minority writing but also (iii) partner with cultural studies and/or (iv) expand the definition of literature to include “the best stories”, (v) especially multimedia stories. Critics would also be well advised to (vi) balance abstraction and theory with close, detailed readings of literature. Editors might encourage new essays demonstrating that (vii) unity in literature is compatible with the celebration of diversity, that explore (viii) the relationsh...
Stimulating Moral Imagination through Literature
2013
Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Education degree in the College of Education and Human Service Professions, University of Minnesota Duluth, 2013Committee names: Diane Rauschenfels. This item has been modified from the original to redact the signatures present.The purpose of this study was to examine the current practices of moral inquiry in high school literature classrooms. While we have measured moral judgement (Kohlberg, 1984), moral behavior (CEP, 2009) and moral imagination (Yurtsever, 2006), we have not targeted these or developed practical ways for educators to measure development of the moral imagination in high school students. “One measure of the impoverishment of the moral imagination in the rising generation” according to Vigen Guroian (1996) at the University of Virginia “is their inability to recognize, make, or to use metaphors.” However, because the public school system has been defined by assessments and data-driven instructio...
I will consider what literature might add to moral thought and understanding as distinct from moral philosophy as it is commonly understood. My argument turns on a distinction between two conceptions of moral thought. One in which the point of moral thought is that it should issue in moral judgement leading to action; the other in which it is concerned also with what Iris Murdoch calls ‘the texture of a man’s being or the nature of his personal vision’. Drawing on this second conception and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, I argue that the question ‘what ought I to do?’ can itself distort moral understanding—that this question may undermine the connection between understanding human life and living a human life. I then argue that insofar as literature is concerned with what is possible within a human life, it has a distinct contribution to make to moral thought, in particular to our reflections on the nature of moral thought itself.
In recent times, a debate has erupted among scholars in English Literature education reigniting age-old fissures in the discipline. In an article published in Harvard Educational Review, I had argued for a globalizing of Literature education given that the teaching of Literature had, for centuries, focused solely on the critical appreciation of style and form to the exclusion of the text's connections to real-world concerns (Author, 2017). 1 I advocated that teachers encourage students to engage with the text's social, political and historical connections to particular cultures, and critically consider texts as catalysts to developing more active responsibility to marginalized communities in the world. In response, Liam