David Leigh, SJ
Although literature has been at the heart of liberal education from the classical to the contemporary world, approaches to literature in the past three decades have made it difficult for many to justify their passion for reading poetry, fiction, and drama. As Frank Farrell has summed up the problem in his study Why Does Literature Matter?, recent critical theory has too often reduced literature to a means of portraying power struggles or of playing language games. The first shift, toward questions of power, is sometimes called “the political or cultural turn” to New Historicism or cultural studies; the second, toward language games, is called “the linguistic turn” to deconstruction. As a result, many literate people have moved from reading literature to reading popular social science books, but with a deep sense of loss. Following suggestions by Farrell, Rita Felski (author of the literary study The Limits of Critique), and others, I suggest that literature contains far more than power struggles or language games: literature helps readers experience a transformative journey in faith and exploration toward understanding and living out the fullness of the Word.
Literature as a way of understanding oneself, others, society, and ultimate questions
Many of my students tell me that they have learned more about themselves and the world through reading novels and watching plays than through other methods of learning. They testify to how well they have come to understand their family or their peers through finding them in a Shakespeare play or a modern novel. Literature conveys understanding through its formal elements—plot, characters, setting, language, etc.—in a way that engages the imagination and whole mind of the reader.
Through the study of these formal elements, students find patterns of meaning that help them to a moment of insight that Felski calls “recognition”—recognition of themselves or others. She suggests that modernist critical use of the metaphor of “epiphany” is a way of expressing this “recognition” in which a text “discloses, makes manifest, forces into consciousness, what is otherwise inaccessible to thought.” Paul Ricoeur calls literature’s power of manifestation “a redescription rather than a reflection . . . an act of creative imitation, not mindless copying.” Thus, this “configuring” of literature is done through the medium of genres, figures of speech, and other literary devices to provide a “redescription” of the world of human experience that, in Fleski’s words, “augments our understanding of how things are.” As Glenn Arbery has said in Why Literature Matters, students and teachers long for what is lost in too much contemporary criticism—“the experience of form as the poetic mode of knowledge, the essential pleasure in world becoming word, the intelligence of feeling, and the revelation literature affords that reality is polysemous, including historical and moral levels, but ultimately disclosing an anagogical meaning.” Some literature is especially suitable for understanding society (e.g. the 19th-century novel), other literature for understanding the self and others (e.g. lyric poetry, Shakespeare, Proust), or understanding ultimate experiences (e.g. Dostoevsky, Hopkins, Denise Levertov, Marilynne Robinson).
Literature as an embodiment of a special type of meaning distinct from but complementary to that of other disciplines
As Farrell suggests, literary texts provide an experience and understanding of aspects of reality that are different from that studied by science or other disciplines and thus require a type of reading that is specifically literary. For example, he notes that some literature provides a way into the life world of the characters and their subjective viewpoints as embodied in their words, monologues, and engagement with others (for instance, in Emma or Waiting for Godot). Other literature goes beyond this phenomenological insight to provide patterns of metaphysical or social meaning, as in the human interactions or dialogue in a novel by Henry James or Cormac McCarth