Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

An excellent article, Scott. I can remember when I was a teenager, we had a family friend who was getting his doctorate in literature at Yale. We had a conversation about it, and he said the role of the critic was more important than that of the artist. He said the critic’s role was to point out all the ideas the artist wasn’t conscious of as he wrote. Or so the theory goes. I asked him how that could be. Did no one look at author intent? He said literary scholars were more knowledgeable about the authors work than the authors themselves, their intent was considered irrelevant. The intent of a genius irrelevant to someone who is only near genius? I thought. We’re getting awfully self-important. Yale was very Freudian at that time, so perhaps it made sense to him, but it didn’t to me.

Recently, reading William Gass on The Soul in the Sentence, in which Freudian theory is well explicated, it became become clear to me what he meant, but it seems awfully reductionist and puts far too much emphasis on repressed sexual desire, especially incestuous desire, and to study literature in such a way I think leaves the writer with nowhere to go. Perhaps that is why our writers today seem to have so little to say, or perhaps it’s simply that technology has made everything so much easier for us, and therefore less interesting to write about. Anyway, the upshot was, that although I was interested in literature, and would eventually write, that conversation turned me off to the idea of formal literary study. I don’t know if it helped or impeded me to become an autodidact, but I’m all for letting dead theorists lie and teaching literature in a manner that is truly useful to the student, in explicating the culture from which it sprang, not deconstructing the author’s  work to a desire for union with mama or papa.

via Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

  • Dennis Recio

    Dear Sir,r nr n I agree with your response to the piece, "Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life". Literary criticism allows us to have various opportunities to interpret the literature but it should never be a replacement for enjoying the literature itself. Too often, people who study these ideas become so accustomed to using them that reading for delight has little value. I still believe, very firmly, that a close reading of the novel, essay, short story, or poem is the best way to go. Reading to "weigh and consider" as Francis Bacon wrote in his essay, "Of Studies" is not a bad way to think about reading literature. But if I return to my personal favorites: Austen's Persuasion, Carroll's Alice books, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Chekhov's plays, or Bronte's Wuthering Heights, I can claim, with relative ease, that these books have given me greater comfort and joy over any work by Foucault or Derrida. Whatever copies of these theorists I have remaining, they have gathered dust on a distant shelf. As for Austen and the rest, they are read and re-read and when I am dead, they will accompany me into my coffin.

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    • TSC

      Thank you, Mr. Recio, or is it Dr. Recio, for your comment. I rarely get a visit and fewer comments, and I am simply amazed at the response I have received to the Chronicle post. Reading for the pleasure of a story well told, a style well formed, and the insight into history and humanity has always been important to me, as well. Many of the books you mention are among my favorites also. I can remember in college memorizing Jabberwocky. It's the first poem I learned by heart. The second and last, was The Shooting of Dan McGrew. n nWhen I was in college, I had an art history professor whose only comment on most of the slides was a deeply satisfied moan. It expressed everything that needed to be said. I was happy to have shared the pleasure of looking at those paintings with him. Would that the same were true of literary critics.

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