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Article Excerpt
This essay is part of an interdisciplinary research project into literary aesthetics and its relationship with pedagogy. The paper brings cognitive and evolutionary scientific perspectives to bear on literary and cultural theory to address the aesthetic effect (defined as the transporting and transformative power of the literary text) and its potential personal or civic benefits. The paper offers non-transcendentalist explanations for the aesthetic experience, viewing it less as a privileged category of feeling than as an experience available to all symbolic beings. The paper also proposes an original thesis about the virtual and transformative space of reading as one that ultimately epitomises intellectual freedom. The inquiry is lent urgency by the current cultural and political climate in which not only literature but also literary studies, despite its long association with education and its prominent place in the Culture Wars, is in institutional decline.
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"Art dangerous for the artist. When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously; then its effect is to form by regression. The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires an overthrow of all conditions that are not favourable to art, and this with the vehemence and unreasonableness of a child." (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 1878)
"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as times goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; die rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact." (Matthew Arnold. 1967, 1888)
Literary aesthetics has been the subject of debate from the beginnings of literary criticism when Plato, in Book 10 of The Republic (c. 373 BCE), evicted poets from his utopian metropolis, suspicious of the kinds of knowledge that poetry imparts and its maddening effects on audiences, and when Aristotle, in Poetics (c. 335-322 BCE), by contrast, argued that the dramatic form of tragedy produces a powerful effect on audiences that inspires critical self-reflection and civic knowledge. The conflict continued in the post-Enlightenment era of modern, scientific "reason," as evidenced in Friedrich Nietzsche's and Matthew Arnold's thoughts on the aesthetic effect provided above. Nietzsche--ironically, with typical poeticism--laments the regressive habits encouraged by flights of fancy, while Arnold celebrates poetry as grounded in a rigorous intellectualism. The argument persists today, perhaps with greater intensity, despite (or perhaps because of) the increased marginality of literature in the public sphere. (1) Marxist or cultural materialist critics such as Terry Eagleton (1990) and David Carter (2001-02), for instance, present literary aesthetics as part of a middle-class or "middle-brow" project of fetishized self-improvement, while neo-humanist critics such as Derek Attridge (2004a and 2004b) and Martha Nussbaum (1995), in comparison, hail the potential for ethical citizenship made available through reading. Indeed, science has recently entered the discussion with self-proclaimed "literary Darwinists" such as Jonathan Gottschall (2005) and Catherine Salmon (2005) suggesting that to focus on the imaginative and transformative nature of literature is misguided. Literature should, instead, be considered in terms of how it reflects a fixed biological and evolutionary reality. Meanwhile, in the field of cognitive psychology, investigations have been conducted into the absorbing and coercive stimulations of narrative (see Green and Brock 2002 or Gerrig 1993, for example.) But despite the distances (in time, place, politics, and discipline) that lie between these articulations of the aesthetic effect, the terms of the debate have remained remarkably consistent. The argument ultimately revolves around the legitimacy--that is, 1) the authenticity or authority; and 2) the personal or civic benefit--of the aesthetic experience, which I would like to conceptualise here as the transporting and transformative power that is implicit to an infinite variety of aesthetic objects.
In this paper, I want to examine the aesthetic question as it relates to literature explicitly within the context of pedagogy and, in particular, within the context of the discipline of literary studies. This framework acknowledges two elements that are intrinsic to many of the above interventions in the field of literary aesthetics. The first is that pedagogy often provides the matrix for the inquiry undertaken into the aesthetic effect, Plato, after all, was a teacher; Arnold was instrumental in making literary studies (or "English") an integral component of the popular education system in nineteenth-century England; Eagleton, Bennett, Nussbaum and Attridge are academics in the humanities; a lot of cognitive analyses of narrative absorption focus on educational contexts (see Green, Brock and Strange 2002, for example); and even "literary Darwinists" present their agenda as the correction of the "postmodern" constructivist fallacies of thinking that allegedly dominate literary studies. The second is that literary transportation and transformation imply a potential for subject reformation that is isomorphic with constructivist theories of pedagogy, something that the place of "English" in education acknowledged from its origins. Indeed, because of these two points, literary studies--despite its marginality in the public sphere--has become a key battlefield of the Culture Wars, with governments, and even scientists, attempting to intervene in matters of literary curriculum or reading practices to exercise control over--even as they typically deny--the cultural forces working to shape subjects and populations. The inquiry is also lent urgency by the current socio-economic, cultural and political climate in which not only literature but also literary studies, despite its long association with education and its prominent place in the Culture Wars, is in institutional decline.
This investigation addresses a number of questions focusing on the transporting and transformative experience of literary texts. To begin with, under the heading of "The experience of literature," I examine the nature of the transporting and transformative effect of reading, making use of inter-disciplinary knowledges in order to offer fresh and non-transcendentalist explanations for the aesthetic response. I conclude the section by recognizing the radical nature of the aesthetic experience, which is implicit in traditional theories of the sublime. In the second section of the paper, "Literature and learning," I elaborate on the connections between theories of reading and theories of learning in terms of the way they operate as agents of subject reformation. I also ask the question: can real personal and social benefit ensue from literature or from literary study, or are literature and literary study, as categories and practices, compromised or enfeebled as mediators of useful knowledge? My position is that literature and literary studies offer potential for individual and social learning and empowerment in ways that do not have to be subsumed under any particular political program and, indeed, that represent what is meant by intellectual freedom.
The Experience of Literature
In Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-First Century, one of a spate of recent books attempting to redeem literature and literary studies in their apparent time of crisis, Mark Roche describes the experience of literature as "divine possession" (2004, 81-82), arguing that it "grants us a...
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