“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 McCarthy. 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