I finished
Why Read? by Mark Edmundson, which I enjoyed a lot despite agreeing with about half of it.
His argument is this:
Literature can provide 'vital options' in the reader's quest to find the good life.
It can replace religious faith in that respect.
You wouldn't know this from the way it is taught at universities, where disinterested enquiry and interpretation are promoted in the humanities.
The prevailing culture in the US is the culture of 'cool'. It has its acute pleasures, but is no good if you are going to study literature. Students of literature need to embarrass themselves and fail. Suspicion falls on anyone who shows enthusiasm and emotion in their study.
Theory encourages students to believe that they are better and know more than the (great) authors they are studying. They have not earned this right.
Theory does have its uses, though, but applying Foucault to a literary text like a piece of translation software is daft.
Literary theory represents the ultimate kowtow to authority because it has been inserted into American literature departments as a response to the perceived need to provide students with a specific body of knowledge that they can take forward into employment. This is part of the fierce competition between universities for students and their money, ie a marketing tool.
A great many English professors despise the writers they study.
Readers should become disciples of the authors they like, and allow themselves to be read by great books.
We only think the field of literature has been strip-mined (which leads bright graduates to study little-known areas of literature against their better instincts) because we haven't been asking the right questions of it.
And so on.
His quiet, genial insistence that the 'good life' is attainable, and worthwhile attaining, is reminiscent of Adam Phillips. I like it, but his thesis seems to ignore the pleasures to be gained from work that lies outside the canon. He's big on the concept of the 'major work'. Lots of food for thought though. I'll be reading it again.
---
So now I'm reading some Wordsworth, to see, I guess, if he can give me some 'vital options'
) and have about 100 books to read that i have purchased from charity shops - 4-5 years worth.
