y. Other texts provide a pattern of self-understanding of the author or characters in relationship to the stages of their childhood or growing up, as in Dorothy Day’s autobiography or Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels. Although these books include power struggles of society, they provide insight into much more on other levels of reality, both immediate and ultimate. As Mark William Roche noted in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, literature gives readers “insights into the essential structures of reality by way of particular stories and images . . . [making visible] those parts of reality that are otherwise veiled to us, especially in a technological age.” Unlike other disciplines, literature symbolically incorporates human experience and knowledge in narrative, lyric, and dramatic forms using concrete and imaginative language. As symbolic, literature can embody human experiences that are difficult to convey in other types of language. Thus literature becomes the vehicle of what Heidegger and others call transformative disclosure through its literary forms.
Literature as an aesthetic use of symbolic, imaginative language
Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of literature—and the one that calls for most attention by teachers and students—is its special use of imaginative language. This use of language includes the range of figures of speech, rhythms of sentences and phrases, poetic devices of sound and repetition, varieties of irony and paradox, and complexities of plotting and character development. These complex aesthetic uses of language and form provide aspects of meaning that go beyond the usual literal or denotative force of other disciplines. The range of such language also includes the variety of literary genres, from lyric to drama to epic to novel, along with the myriad of subgenres that make up the history of literary forms. All of these aesthetic varieties of language provide the method for expressing a multitude of meaning, but also for engaging the reader in the pure beauty of language as a human expression. Thus, studying literature is not only a way of understanding the world of meaning but a way of enjoying the world of beauty.
In the world of beauty, as Arbery reminds us, “the greatest works achieve form in ways inseparable from their meaning, none more so than the Iliad; they give the highest pleasure to the imagination, for reasons that can be analyzed but not entirely explained; they both elicit and inform emotions in ways that require the whole intelligence of the work.” As Felski points out, the poet “Seamus Heaney speaks of the creation of soundscapes rather than landscapes, describing a form of affinity with poetry steered as much by musicality as by meaning, or rather, where meaning adheres to a poem’s sonic effects as much as the things or themes to which it points.”
Literature as an ethical challenge to prepare to act in the world
Just as Horace pointed out that literature is both utile (useful) as well as dulce (enjoyable), so modern critics like Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and James Wood have emphasized the power of literary texts to raise ethical questions and to engage readers in seeking answers to them. Since literature deals with the complexities of human action and interaction on the personal, interpersonal, and societal levels, it gets readers embroiled in the struggles between good and evil in the lives of its characters, as in Antigone, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, Crime and Punishment, The Jungle, Invisible Man, or Lila. Felski also notes that some literature creates a “reaction to what is startling, painful, even horrifying.” Thus, novels like All Quiet on the Western Front or Beloved, or drama like Disgraced, work to shock the reader into an emotional awareness of the social violence of war, slavery, abuse, discrimination, poverty, or other patent injustices.
One of the effects of shocking literature is to cause a sudden painful new consciousness and to evoke a sympathy for people undergoing violent injustice. No matter where readers may stand on particular solutions to suc