Why Literature?
In my Critical Practices class for graduate school in Literature, we discussed the development of English and Literature as an academic subject and the difficulties that the humanities are having present day in universities where people prefer to have a degree that has a job title attached to it and question the relevence of literature. Near the end of the class, my professor asked us to think of her as an administrator faced with making cuts to departments and to convince her as to why we should even keep a literature department functioning. It was interesting and funny to see all our reactions, which tended to incredulation, irritation, laughter, and even anger. Of course, we are all graduate literature students, some of us, like myself, even did their undergraduate in literature, so there was a bit of a bias. Still, we collectively struggled to voice why literature was so important at first. All I could think of was two things, the book 1984, while not about the death of literature, I kept thinking about what kind of world it would be if creative thinking were abandoned and only the logical and “useful” and preciseness was left. The other was what Martin Luther King Jr’s “I had a dream” would have been if it was written by a technical writer! I thought, while driving home, that for me, the true importance in literature lies in its record of history. While history is a litany of dates and facts–literature is a history of humanity. We can know historically that there was place called Auschwitz in a country called Germany being run from this date to this date and that untold numbers of people died. But it is in books, like Shindler’s List and Ellie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary that we can begin to imagine what it felt like and smelt like and tasted like in a way that facts never can engender. Without imagination, we will forget and there is nothing more dangerous than forgetting the inherent truth in the lives of the people and the society that facts and dates can never encapsulate.
Then while working on a final exam in my Romantic Literature class, I remembered a passage from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry:
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
It exceeds all imagination.
