The Value of Literature, Today and Tomorrow (original) (raw)

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.

Afterword: Turning Back to Literature

PMLA, 2010

Three times I rushed, and my heart urged me to hold her, and three times she flew from my hands like a shadow or even a dream.—Homer, The Odyssey 11.206–08.To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective lo...

Editors' Introduction: Literature and the Nation: Confronting Unhealed Wounds

New Perspectives on Turkey, 2007

In the lecture he delivered at the award ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, Orhan Pamuk said: "For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing." 1 One can discern in his words an implied relationship between wounds of every kind-personal, physical, psychological, social and historical-on the one hand, and literature on the other. Writers often work through and explore the implications and consequences of these wounds not only for themselves or for other individuals, but also for society as a whole. In this context, literature is an act of acknowledgment, recognition and encounter, which in many cases involves confrontation as well. Located between the personal and the social, with their various emotional, sensual and mental manifestations, literature has the potential to break open questions and silences involved in the individual and collective experiences of past and present. This is not only an issue of mediation and reflection. Literature may also unsettle and, thus, serve to rework, historical and social circumstances by way of bringing to light the hidden, the silenced and the repressed, more often than not in a discomforting and disturbing manner.

The shipwrecking of literature

Journal of Romance Studies

It has become something of a cliché to say that avant-garde literature died in France in the early 1980s. Yet, while it is evident that the beginning of the decade marked a turn in literary history, it is also clear that experimental writing practices have emerged since then, and that any assertion of the death of (post)modernism must therefore be relativized. This article considers the work of one writer, Olivier Cadiot, who entered the literary scene with fracas in 1988 with the publication of L'Art poétic'. Over a period of roughly thirty years, Cadiot has questioned what it means to read and write literature through producing a body of imaginative and theoretically dense cross-genre works. In so doing, he has asserted the creative and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary literary practices in the face of discourse which identifies French literature as being in a state of decline.

Literature of the Future and the Future of Literature

Studies in Literature and Language, 2016

With the advent of technology, the triumph of immediacy, and the emergence of an environment of epistemic humility, a consensus has grown in some literary and academic quarters that literature is either dead, at death’s door, or at best in intensive care. This paper argues that this kind of diagnosis and autopsy of the discipline is not due to the irrelevance of the old forms of literature in today’s world, but rather to a failure of nerve and imagination in the face of immediacy and market temptation. The different scenarios and attempts to digitize the printed book through ebooks and “biterature” result in the literature of the future rather than the future of literature; the value of literature lies in its ability to challenge, rather than reinforce, our world assumptions. My argument is that for literature to be healthy and continue to thrive in today’s environment, it should not be chameleon-like and forced to adjust its values to the tailored needs of the information and immed...