Rick Gekoski thinks that reading may be a tad bit overrated:
One might argue that literacy is unalloyedly a good thing – yes, I can think of counter-examples, but then again one always can – but it is pretty clear to me that reading, as in reading of literature, is not. What we read can affect us vitally, penetrate, stimulate and inform us, but not always in the right ways, or at the right times, or about the right things.
If you think that reading the right things in the right ways is morally bracing, improves one’s discriminations and heightens sensitivity – basically, the Leavis line – then all you have to do is look at the behaviour of Dr Leavis himself to begin to doubt the thesis. Indeed, if it were true that wide and deep reading redounds wholly positively on the development of a wholesome self, consider a typical member of a university English department, and despair.
(Via: Alan Jacobs, who is a decent chap despite being an English professor)
February 17th, 2011 | 3:03 pm
I often sigh and think how nice a guy I *could* have been if I hadn’t become an academic. . . .
February 17th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
One sin of which academics in particular must beware is pride of intellect. Bad thing about it is that pride of intellect, unlike, say, lechery or sloth, makes one such an obnoxious person. (Academics are also prone to lechery and sloth, too. Regarding sloth, here I am posting when I’m supposed to be grading papers.)
February 17th, 2011 | 6:03 pm
The literature of modernism and postmodernism was a literature that put aside certain moral assumptions and tried to embrace “truth”. To embrace something, you first have to find it.
I’m not being snarky when I say that: in the early 20th century – and especially after the trauma of WWI – it apparently seemed to all the young people like they’d been lied to about pretty much everything there was.
But there are truths and then there is the truth. Some things are true, but are not complete; if you focus only on these things, you will go mad. Modernism frequently focuses on, and celebrates, exactly these things. It’s frequently all about breaking taboos and saying the unsayable and examining (or is that re-examining) everything. The rest of the century was mostly just filling out the implications and further detailing the ramifications.
But 20th century literature is not necessarily good for the soul, morally or spiritually.
It is interesting to me to consider the ways in which the literary establishment of the mid-20th c. responded to J.R.R. Tolkien – a writer whose work is full of literary merits, but all the wrong ones. Here is a guy who admired all the wrong kinds of literary works. In his own writing, he used all the wrong kinds of devices to pursue themes that had been deemed unfashionable – even off limits. “Obsolete”.
Looking at the differences between how critics of the 1970s responded to Tolkien vs. how he is treated now, my feeling is that we are just now getting to the point where English teachers at the college level are ready to recognize that maybe all the things we have been taught are “true” about literature may just be just another “movement”, or set of literary truths-as-fashion, rather than eternally enduring truths.
That maybe, at some point in the future – maybe – fiction could be both moral and good; that fiction of quality could see protagonists as exerting control over their environment rather than being passive victims of forces beyond their control, and so on.
(Unfortunately, some overenthusiastic teachers are going overboard in the other direction, eagerly snapping up anything popular – however junky – and declaring it “literary”. I attribute this to a century’s worth of asking questions like, just what does it mean to be “literary” anyway?)
February 17th, 2011 | 8:50 pm
Interesting. When I was a student (many years ago, now), I was appalled by both the modern literature I was asked to read and the approach to it taken by at least one professor at Very Prestigious University’s French department. I retreated to medieval, Renaissance, and 16th century works for the rest of my undergraduate studies. Even there, I didn’t understand the approved critical approach, and didn’t go on to graduate school. I don’t think the problem is the literature – at least, not necessarily. The problem is how one is taught to read in the fashionable academic departments. A healthy antidote is actually reading good literature.
February 17th, 2011 | 8:51 pm
(YIKES! You can tell how long it’s been… I meant to say 17th century, not 16th century. Sorry.)
February 17th, 2011 | 11:34 pm
As one who quit pursuing a doctorate in English Literature in favor of the priesthood, this headline made me snort water.
February 17th, 2011 | 11:50 pm
Larkin’s observation in the article cited is relevant here. Just as, in Larkin’s terms, it’s not so much a matter of being “a lover of books” as of which books you love, it’s also not so much a matter of reading per se as of how you read and why you read that determines the good or the ill that the reading will do. Reading in many if not most of the ways that professors of English are required to read will indeed do more ill for you than good. That’s because the English prof is required to exercise a prideful and uncharitable mastery over the text that either evacuates the text of any meaning at all or substitutes alternative meanings, which are frequently false and untrue to the text. But there are other and better places to read than an English department, with better ways to read, and a better class of readers and — much more importantly — of people than you tend to find there.
February 18th, 2011 | 12:13 am
Books can be good or bad, but the sort of people who would decide which books ought to exist can only be bad. Badness, as defined by Augustine, is seeking what’s good in a way that lacks something essential.
What better example of this could there be than the people who would deny God’s providential permission for awful ideas to be expressed in any and all forms, including print?
February 18th, 2011 | 1:15 am
English profs read literature?
That’s funny. I could have sworn they read Derrida instead.
February 18th, 2011 | 2:32 am
Wasn’t Derrida a 17th century French dance?
February 18th, 2011 | 7:26 am
This morning I was reading Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” and I had an experience I often have while reading such books in bed. I was deep in the weeds and I set the book down to think for a moment, and then I looked over at my icon of Jesus that hangs on a chest of drawers beside my bed. He’s holding the Bible with Alpha printed on one page and Omega on the other. I look at that and wondered “why in God’s name do I waste so much time wrestling with these books?”
February 18th, 2011 | 9:27 am
C.S. Lewis answered this more than half a century ago. Does anyone actually believe we read in order to become better people? It is a silly proposition to begin with. We don’t read to improve ourselves ethically, we read so as to enlarge our experience, to engage our imagination, to catch a glimpse of the nature of being (to cite a recent FT article). Those who don’t read may be ethically superior to me (or not, depends upon who they are), but their worlds are much smaller than mine. The assumptions underlying the question are all wrong.
February 18th, 2011 | 9:27 am
“But there are other and better places to read than an English department, with better ways to read, and a better class of readers and — much more importantly — of people than you tend to find there.”
Wish I had known this and taken it to heart in 1980. It could have saved me the decade I spent finding it out on my own.
February 18th, 2011 | 9:29 am
Reading literature CAN make you a better person, but most professors of modern literature don’t actually read the stuff, they “deconstruct” it, looking for various “narratives” and attempting to discover the author’s “semiotic code”, usually through the prism of progressive or neo-Marxist ideology.
This reduces all literature from art to an exercise in cryptography, and admits of only one reading of any book. Other than James Joyce’s (absolutely unreadable) Ulysses, how many books are actually written in that manner?
February 18th, 2011 | 9:33 am
The PoMo disease has infected many other academic disciplines, including my own, which is history. Australian historian Keith Windschuttle detailed this in this perceptive (but ultimately depressing) book, “The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past” (http://www.amazon.com/Killing-History-Literary-Theorists-Murdering/dp/1893554120).
February 18th, 2011 | 9:45 am
This MAY not be what Mr. Gekoski was getting at, but I’ll offer this thought anyway.
A book, ANY book, automatically commands a certain amount of respect that a movie, play, song, TV show or any other work of art does not.
Suppose you see a brilliant film, one that inspires deep thought and profound emotion, and start discussing it in great detail. SOMEONE will inevitably sneer, “Come on, it’s only a movie!” Has anyone ever said to you, “Lighten up- it’s only a book”?
When we’re kids, what are our parents always telling us? “Turn off the TV- read a book and improve your mind.” It was always taken for granted that to read a book, ANY book, was to improve your mind! It’s far from obvious, of course, that reading “My Boyfriend is a Vampire” or “Paris Hilton’s Tips For Girls” or a choose-your-own-adventure book (“to fight the ghost, turn to page 20; to run away, turn to page 33″) is better for a young mind than watching “Nova.” Still, kids learn that reading a book, even a lousy one, commands more respect from parents and teachers than watching a superb TV show.
Reading can be intellectually and spiritually uplifting. It can also be enjoyable waste of time. Occasionally, it can be dangerous or damaging. It’s NOT an activity that deserves reflexive applause… but it sometimes GETS that kind of uncritical applause. Many a parent lets his or her kid buy horrible books or graphic novels, reasoning, “Well, at least he’s READING.”
But reading is not a virtue per se.
February 18th, 2011 | 11:35 am
Or, to put it in simple Lewisian terms….
you have to read the right sort of books.
I don’t think those who say that reading improves a person ever intended to say that any reading by any sort of person would make him better. I believe the idea has always been that a good person is improved by good reading. The arrogant fool will gain little, or perhaps be hardened in his folly, and the best man can be corrupted by evil company on the page. But perhaps even the arrogant fool might be somewhat humbled and grow in wisdom if he reads the right books with an open heart.
February 18th, 2011 | 10:13 pm
“Other than James Joyce’s (absolutely unreadable) Ulysses,”
Dear Stuart Koehl: I’ll forget you said this, eventually. But my eyelid is twitching a bit.
February 19th, 2011 | 8:44 am
“Dear Stuart Koehl: I’ll forget you said this, eventually. But my eyelid is twitching a bit.”
Everyone has a pet peeve. Mine is Ulysses, the novel that destroyed the novel.
February 19th, 2011 | 10:11 am
“Other than James Joyce’s (absolutely unreadable) Ulysses,”
Dear Stuart Koehl: I’ll forget you said this, eventually. But my eyelid is twitching a bit.
I had to take a class to understand that book.
But then I don’t claim to be the brightest bulb in the box, either.
February 19th, 2011 | 10:12 pm
The entire notion of “truth” is a secular, modern idea arising from Kantian, Enlightenment philosophy. It is hypocritical and ignorant to admonish modernists in an effort to uphold “truth.”
February 20th, 2011 | 10:01 am
The entire notion of “truth” is a secular, modern idea arising from Kantian, Enlightenment philosophy. It is hypocritical and ignorant to admonish modernists in an effort to uphold “truth.”
Really? So Jesus was a Kantian:
“I am the way, the truth and the light” (Jn 14:6)
“The hour is coming , and now is, when the true worshippers will follow the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (Jn 4:23-25)
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of Truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will no speak on his own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will tell you things to come.” (Jn 16:12-13)
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