The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges

From Shelton Walsmith's studio; photo by John Pack. Ten points if you can figure out how I got to this image from my theme.

As I was saying to my teacher JM last week, I think the reason my Fulbright application was unsuccessful was that I did not sufficiently explain, even to myself, the reasons for doing literature and the humanities. It was almost a good thing to have suffered that failure if it drives me to re-think what I'm doing and why.

As with "My Archive," this will be an entry that gets tagged and updated. It's clear to me that the main way for me to improve my writing next is to really push myself to go back to older writings, often one-shot comments on single topics, to improve them and connect them up with other things. My new outlining tool, checkvist.com, should make connections a bit more likely to happen as well.

So here's the new pattern I'm interesting in applying: first the outline of my reasoning so far, and then behind the cut, an immediate attempt to write out at least the main ideas contained in the outline, if not a complete write-up of the outline.

• Chapter 0: The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges
  • 1. Compare subject to subject
    • The Postmodern Subject, for example
    • But why does it matter in a changing world?
  • 2. Show the social and political climate
    • Encouraging "civil society," for example
    • pointing out our vulnerability if we become too "infantile" : towards moral purpose.
    • pointing out the rise of conservative politics -- Berlant
  • 3. Share and compare artistic techniques
    • "Appeal" as a main question
      • Chaves:
      • Stanley Fish: Art has no practical use; that's its use
  • 4. Other sources: Perry Link 2000, Calvino 1986, Engel 1973, Felski 2008

Literature is a craft that reveals. Its main use value in the larger world of philosophy, the humanities, and the issues of the day seems to me to be concentrated in the revelatory power of literature: it shows us who we are. It exposes the human condition. It can give us guidance regarding the challenges we face.

To my present thinking, this revelatory power works on two levels that are connected in complex ways: first the individual, and then the scales larger than that of individual: society, nation, race, gender.

Literature reveals individuals: speaking, performing subjects whose experiences, memories and motivations have both differences and points in common between our own. So we read about these individuals to enrich our own sense of ourselves and others around us, as individuals. Are feelings and activities are described. Are fears and desires, as well. The main building block of this kind of writing is individual experience, real or imagined, realist or allegorical. In Tang Xiaobing's work on Wang Anyi, for example, the subject Wang Anyi is compared directly to the subject Julia Kristeva to argue that reading Wang Anyi would inform our sense of the postmodern subject generally while at the same time beginning to include China in the conversation.

On larger scales, literature can be used to show the social and political climate of a place and time. Translations of Turgenev into Korean are part of a story that shows the growth of the early Korean state, the differences from Japan, and the characteristic understanding of all Korean people as proletariat, for example. In Chinese literature and art, we examine the best that is available to consider its potential for developing (or at least calling for) civil society. Similarly, Lauren Berlant defined the concept of the "infantile citizen" in American cultural politics in order to diagnose a selfishness and thoughtlessness that she clearly believes is infecting us. Both this and the Chinese example reveal moral and political agenda to literary criticism: we don't just "take the temperature" of our social structures, we give a diagnoses and treatment plan, even if it is implicit (and in Berlant it is often explicit).

After this consideration, a worry begins to develop that the revelatory power of literature may overlook craft, which is the central interest of many who write about art and literature. The concept of appeal often enters the discussion, as it does when Chaves introduces his book on Mei Yao-chen. Though Mei is not famous in China, Chaves avers, we should not worry about that. We should only worry whether he is a poet that might have some "appeal" to English readers.

Beyond "appeal," I seem to remember that writers like Stanley Fish often say that literature has no use value, and this is its use. They might decry my focus on the revelatory power as a misconstruing of literature's use, which is not to tell me the spirit of the age, but to communicate only the artful imaginings of its producer. I must revisit this argument before I disbelieve it entirely.