The struggle for the serious study and appreciation of literature continues in our society, where enormous emphasis has been placed on the “practical” disciplines of math and science, and specialized academics more and more produce arcane, overtly politicized work that the public seems to find joyless and irrelevant.
Scott Herring, author and lecturer in the writing program at UC Davis, tells a story about his grandfather and a 77-year-old Ford Model B engine head he came upon while hiking in the Montana wilderness, and suggests that literature’s practical value lies in its ability to deliver the scents, sounds and sensations of the past, and that renewed emphasis on this aspect of study will revive a withered, disappearing and essential discipline. —ARK
Scott Herring at The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Today’s literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.
History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.
... Let the dead French theorists lie. Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past. If you think about it, that’s what we’ve been doing in class for the last hundred years: explaining how to pronounce “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?” in Early Modern English, for instance, or describing a Boeing B-17 to help students understand Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Once ordinary people note that we’re doing something useful again, they might stop looking at us like we’re nuts. And maybe we’ll even get some jobs back.
If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.
There is actually something new happening with literature.
Because the Net enables cheap publication, mostly paid for in advance by its clients, authors can bypass agents and publishers and go directly to the public. Many are doing so, selling downloads for 99 cents and the like, through Amazon or their own web sites. While the authors may not be up to the level of Dostoyevsky, many of them are good enough for the casual reader, certainly as good as most traditionally-published authors. We should observe a relatively rapid evolution in the meaning of ‘literature’ which will doubtless be deplored by the old regime’s gatekeepers, regardless of what it is. Paper still has a long future ahead of it, but it is probably not a big-money future. I expect the powers and repute of publishing houses to go into decline; and academics will have to step lively to stay with the wave.
‘Euclid hath looked on beauty bare’ and all that, I suppose.
The function of the education industry is to train and direct the minds of those it processes in the interests and according to the values of the ruling class. Actually enjoying and learning from literature is something quite different and separate from this product.
By raja1031, August 30, 2011 at 4:02 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
There is more poetry in Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism or the special and general theories of relativity than any literature can deliver. This from an English Lit major ( class of ‘68 ).
If the emphasis on “practical” math and science has been so ” enormous” please explain the pathetic understanding of basic science among American students and the lack of the ability of most Americans to rise to a mathematical capacity beyond addition and subtraction.
Yes literature can summon up the atmosphere of the past. But so can mathematics and science. To reduce them merely to the realm of the practical indicates, at least to me, a total lack of the appreciation of both as sublimely creative.
It is dangerous to speculate about what “ordinary people” might mean to Scott Herring—or anyone else, for that matter. Speculatively speaking, it must mean “people locked in limitations of a present”
without perspective or reference beyond that present.
Further, Herring’s presumption is that by releasing people from these limitations we will gain their approval by “doing something useful.” And further, that their reading about other perspectives will “release” them.
Frankly, IMO, the problem of “limitations” is not so much lack of exposure (by reading or otherwise)to the realities of the past and the possibilities of the future. Perhapsbut fear of moving beyond their immediate personal experiences, or the inability to empathize with other lives beyond contemporary circumstances may be at the root of such limitations.
It seems to me that the so-called “liberal arts” education (for all its faults) can, and often does give young people vicarious formative experiences that serve them the rest of their lives as liberation from the limits of immediacy. It encourages them at an impressionable age to learn to imagine “how it would be” or “would have been” to live in “altered states” so to speak.
Some proof of this widely overlooked assumption might be found when we think about, for example, the right wing tendency to focus on the Revolutionary War period as the examplar of America’s virtuous past, and the desire to “go back” to former (presumably simpler) times.
This vision is, I think, deliberately (though unconsciously) an attempt to avoid having to cope with complicated imagining. Likewise, problems of the future such as global warming, the ultimate result of an atomic war, or the vast possibilities of the Internet or of stem cell manipulation are faced unwillingly if at all. Instead, some “saving miracle” is called into pay to avoid having to cope with mind-expanding, and mind-boggling probabilities ahead.
Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
Email 
Print
Share
_120_83.jpg)
Email to a friend
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
By Anarcissie, August 31, 2011 at 7:39 pm Link to this comment
There is actually something new happening with literature.
Because the Net enables cheap publication, mostly paid for in advance by its clients, authors can bypass agents and publishers and go directly to the public. Many are doing so, selling downloads for 99 cents and the like, through Amazon or their own web sites. While the authors may not be up to the level of Dostoyevsky, many of them are good enough for the casual reader, certainly as good as most traditionally-published authors. We should observe a relatively rapid evolution in the meaning of ‘literature’ which will doubtless be deplored by the old regime’s gatekeepers, regardless of what it is. Paper still has a long future ahead of it, but it is probably not a big-money future. I expect the powers and repute of publishing houses to go into decline; and academics will have to step lively to stay with the wave.
Report thisBy EmileZ, August 31, 2011 at 1:07 pm Link to this comment
The Brothers Karamazov will always be useful.
I have been watching a lot of american movies lately and those that might fall under the serious category I find to be lifeless and formulaic.
I just watched a movie called “Helen” about a female music proffesor who suddenly gets really depressed (apparently she had a history).
It was a piece of shit.
It was a piece of shit.
At the end she agreed to electro-convulsive therapy and her close female friend who didn’t want to get better jumped off a roof.
Need I say more???
Report thisBy Anarcissie, August 31, 2011 at 12:56 pm Link to this comment
‘Euclid hath looked on beauty bare’ and all that, I suppose.
The function of the education industry is to train and direct the minds of those it processes in the interests and according to the values of the ruling class. Actually enjoying and learning from literature is something quite different and separate from this product.
Report thisBy raja1031, August 30, 2011 at 4:02 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
There is more poetry in Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism or the special and general theories of relativity than any literature can deliver. This from an English Lit major ( class of ‘68 ).
If the emphasis on “practical” math and science has been so ” enormous” please explain the pathetic understanding of basic science among American students and the lack of the ability of most Americans to rise to a mathematical capacity beyond addition and subtraction.
Yes literature can summon up the atmosphere of the past. But so can mathematics and science. To reduce them merely to the realm of the practical indicates, at least to me, a total lack of the appreciation of both as sublimely creative.
Report thisBy gerard, August 29, 2011 at 5:06 pm Link to this comment
It is dangerous to speculate about what “ordinary people” might mean to Scott Herring—or anyone else, for that matter. Speculatively speaking, it must mean “people locked in limitations of a present”
Report thiswithout perspective or reference beyond that present.
Further, Herring’s presumption is that by releasing people from these limitations we will gain their approval by “doing something useful.” And further, that their reading about other perspectives will “release” them.
Frankly, IMO, the problem of “limitations” is not so much lack of exposure (by reading or otherwise)to the realities of the past and the possibilities of the future. Perhapsbut fear of moving beyond their immediate personal experiences, or the inability to empathize with other lives beyond contemporary circumstances may be at the root of such limitations.
It seems to me that the so-called “liberal arts” education (for all its faults) can, and often does give young people vicarious formative experiences that serve them the rest of their lives as liberation from the limits of immediacy. It encourages them at an impressionable age to learn to imagine “how it would be” or “would have been” to live in “altered states” so to speak.
Some proof of this widely overlooked assumption might be found when we think about, for example, the right wing tendency to focus on the Revolutionary War period as the examplar of America’s virtuous past, and the desire to “go back” to former (presumably simpler) times.
This vision is, I think, deliberately (though unconsciously) an attempt to avoid having to cope with complicated imagining. Likewise, problems of the future such as global warming, the ultimate result of an atomic war, or the vast possibilities of the Internet or of stem cell manipulation are faced unwillingly if at all. Instead, some “saving miracle” is called into pay to avoid having to cope with mind-expanding, and mind-boggling probabilities ahead.