Hawthorne concurs! Great works of literature are the result of the hard labor of self-examination carried out to a degree that most of us will never approach, not because we must spend all our time barely surviving in this brutal economy, but because of the sheer courage such self-examination requires. No matter how much the world or “the economy” changes, the Greeks will still be right. The geniuses of the Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance will still be right. We English majors who went on to grad school and then became professors sometimes forget that the first, inestimable value of the self-examination provoked by literature is not that it facilitates the political project of critiquing mass culture or deconstructing destructive popular ideologies. Self-examination is a most important skill because it is a condition of possibility for human love; it is the practice of seeing one’s self through other eyes and developing empathy for both that other and that self it looks upon. It is precisely because the economy, and our fear of it, has become what it has become in the minds of the next generation, that we need literature now more than ever to remind us of perpetual cycles bigger than economic boom and bust, cycles that actually are natural, in which humans across all cultures and all time periods have found ways, albeit imperfectly, to care for others when all worldly wisdom said it would be wiser to care only for self.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 23:20:18 +0000
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