The Use and Abuse of Literature Read Free Page A

are different. It is the claim of their difference, the insistence on the overthrow of the imprisoning past at the same time that the past is inevitably repeated, that produces the dialectical push and pull of literary history—and often generates some of the best kinds of literary criticism. But it is hard to imagine today the claims for the
importance
of literature that were still being debated in the middle of the twentieth century. What happened to the primacy of literature, once regarded as the indispensable lingua franca for educated men and women?
    Matthew Arnold considered a knowledge of literature to be beneficial not only to the critical thinking and moral health of the individual but also to a program of social advancement. In his work as an inspector of schools, he saw English education as a way of “civilizing the next generation of the lower classes, who, as things are going, will have most of the political power of the country in their hands.” 17 It’s important to note from today’s vantage point that Arnold—who was named professor of poetry at Oxford during the period when he also served as a government schools inspector—understood literature to be a key aspect ofsocial improvement, both for the individual and for the general culture. In his view, poetry and criticism were not merely pleasant diversions but, rather, undertakings as serious and valuable as moneymaking or scientific advancement. The way to secure the future of England—then a Victorian powerhouse of industry and empire—and the future of the laboring classes, was through literary education, a kind of education heretofore regarded as the privilege of the privileged.
    Today that sense has pretty much disappeared, replaced by expertise in science and in information technology, on the one hand, and by visual literacy on the other. By
visual
, what is now meant is moving images (films, videos, television, MTV, advertising) as well as paintings and photographs. Quotable quotes are far more likely to be cited from films, television, or advertisements than from literature. “Just do it.” “Go ahead, make my day.” “I’ll be back.” Even politicians, who once studiously quoted poets and philosophers, now choose slogans and citations from popular culture. “Mission accomplished.” “Bring ’em on.” So the idea that knowledge of and easy familiarity with literature is either a social accomplishment or a cultural or professional asset must seem quaint. Yet the wordplay involved in coining terms for modern popular culture—especially in visual rebuses like INXS, Ludacris, or Xzibit—is not completely dissimilar to the kind of visual cleverness in, for example, the hieroglyphic poems of George Herbert in the seventeenth century.
    After a spurt of enthusiasm among scholars in adjacent fields like history, anthropology, and philosophy—the so-called linguistic turn of the 1970s and 1980s—literature, literary theory, and literary studies have fallen behind in both academic cachet and intellectual influence. More to the point—for the key questions here do not concern scholars so much as they do readers and the general public—literature is often undervalued or misunderstood as something that needs to be applied to the experiences of life. Practical concerns with careers and financial security have dominated the choices made by ambitious and worried young people who want to make sure education fits them for the lives they think they want to lead. Careers in economics, banking, technology, or law do not include literature, except as an add-on or elective. Nor is the typicalEnglish major necessarily the way to encounter literature in an active, inquiring way. Even when literature is read, taught, and studied, it is often interrogated for wisdom or moral lessons. The clumsy formulations I grew up with—what is the moral of the story? what is the hero’s or heroine’s tragic flaw?—still influence and flatten the questions people