 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 such injustices, they cannot avoid reflecting on, discussing, and searching for ways to go beyond them to a more humane world. In his essay “Literature and Social Justice,” Gerald Graff admits that they must explore the controversies arising from ethical issues in shocking literature. As Farrell says, “It is not just that we see characters going through kinds of ethical decision-making; we become aware of the ways in which we set ourselves in relation to an ethical world . . . ” Gregory Jusdanis has summed up this ethical dimension in relation to the aesthetic dimension in his book Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature: Greek comedy “highlights the dual capacity of art, to provide pleasure and a social purpose at the same time . . . From its fictional universe, we derive much enjoyment . . . but are also able to gaze back at the actual one, criticize it, see alternatives, or seek to transform it.”
Literature as interpersonal communication on the deepest levels
Among the neglected aspects of literature in critical theory today (except in studies of autobiography) is the interpersonal relationship between the author and reader. What was once an important dimension for the Romantic writer has been reduced to a problem of skeptical knowledge of the other. Yet students on their literary journey often find that the author of great poetry or fiction seems to be “speaking to me.” Is it too much to suggest that we might learn from psychological studies of literary readings by students? Can we even understand what the French critic Charles Du Bos meant in his 1938 lectures on “What Is Literature?” when he claimed that “literature is the place where two souls encounter each other”? For Du Bos, the “soul” meant the deepest part of the human person, thus implying that a great author speaks to the reader from that deepest dimension of the self; as a devotee of John Keats, he agreed that “life is a vale of soul-making.” For Du Bos, then, “great poetry is the expression of that to which the human soul responds and clings.” Pe