h 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.” Perhaps the recent interest in requiring students to write “reflection” papers as well as analytical papers on literature might suggest that we are recovering this interest in the interpersonal dimension of literature. When a reader says that a poem or novel “speaks to me,” can we help them explore this encounter with the author and text by means of deep reflection?
Literature as emotional engagement and development of empathy
Beneath the interpersonal lies the personal emotion in the depths of the reader. Yet, as Felski notes, critics have made teachers too embarrassed to discuss the emotional responses of their students. Too often, this response goes only to the level of “I liked the poem.” However, Felski says that we must not forget that most students become emotionally engaged with some literature, even to the point of feeling “enchantment.” She rebuts critics who reduce such engaged emotional reading to lack of “aesthetic distance,” when she contests that “enchantment” is “potentially enlivening, energizing, even ethical, encouraging a stance of openness and generosity to the world” and thus avoiding “sinking us ever deeper into the void of a dispiriting, self-corroding skepticism.” In fact, she argues that such enchantment does not mean that students miss the literary texture because their emotional engagement drives them on to study more carefully the complexity of the text. The result is that they become “enchanted” with the means as well as the meaning of their emotional engagement. From such engagement, as we have noted above, readers also develop their emotional life to include an ethical dimension of empathy. Students of mine have recently surprised me by their reports of the emotional power of Octavia Butler’s Kindred or Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. As Glenn Arbery sums up this dimension of literature, “Poetic experience is a schooling of the emotions and feelings that give reason not only its warmth and pulse, but its general accuracy, so that the finest feeling is necessary for the 