rhaps 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 most robust
Literature as an encounter with the spiritual or ultimate Mystery
Traditional literature has always included a variety of genres that embody for the reader the world of spiritual or ultimate meaning. Most literature began with scriptures, hymns, religious journeys, or rituals. Much literature from the medieval to the modern period used spiritual genres, as we see in the writings of mystics and the poetry of Donne, Herbert, the Romantics, Hopkins, Eliot, Levertov, and Cairns. This dimension tends to be lost to modern students when all literature is studied only as a social power struggle or a language game. Although, as Charles Taylor argued in A Secular Age, the modern period has become publicly a secular age with few common spiritual experiences for many, the spiritual potential of literature remains available to the open reader. The reader, however, must learn to be open to what Arbery calls “a kind of pure receptivity,” for “the beauty of form . . . cannot be made by human will and expectation. Something else—some super-added grace—must descend with the transformed matter.” Thus mentors find ways to open young readers to the final dimensions of what Dante called “spiritual” or “anagogical” levels of meaning. Even for persons without clear religious convictions, such readings of ultimate meaning can become at least understandable within a historical context, as teachers of medieval literature have found. In addition, Paul Ricoeur affirms the power of some literature to produce a “transfiguration” in the reader. Thus most students can engage with literature of ultimate meaning with at least an imaginative engagement with “how it feels” to experience a spiritual moment (e.g. Brothers Karamazov, Four Quartets, White Noise).
On the level of theory, we can make use of the metaphor of incarnation to explore this ultimate dimension of literature. As Charles Du Bos has written, “All literature is an incarnation . . . in the living flesh of words” as “the creative emotion incarnates itself in the form and th