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Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?

  • J. Hillis Miller
Published/Copyright: August 10, 2011
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From the journal Volume 129 Issue 1-2

Abstract

It does not go without saying that literature should be read or taught in universities in these bad days. Worldwide, we are experiencing many challenging problems and transformations – climate change, global financial meltdown, the defunding of universities, the dominance of new digital media, a big shift from literary study to cultural studies. Reading literature hardly seems likely to help confront these problems. Two positive answers to the question in the title can nevertheless be given: 1) Reading literature, for those who like to do it, is an end in itself, a good in itself. 2) Literature may possibly teach its readers how to resist the lies and distortions with which we are inundated in the media and in politicians' speeches these days.

Published Online: 2011-08-10
Published in Print: 2011-August

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
  2. Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
  3. Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
  4. Irreversibility
  5. Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
  6. The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
  7. Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
  8. Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
  9. Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
  10. The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
  11. Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
  12. Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
  13. Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
  14. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
  15. On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
  16. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
  17. Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
  18. Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
  19. Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
  20. Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
  21. Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
  22. Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
  23. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
  24. Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
  25. Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
  26. Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
  27. Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
  28. Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
  29. Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
  30. Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
  31. Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
  32. Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
  33. Eingegangene Schriften
https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2011.003

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
  2. Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
  3. Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
  4. Irreversibility
  5. Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
  6. The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
  7. Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
  8. Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
  9. Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
  10. The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
  11. Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
  12. Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
  13. Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
  14. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
  15. On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
  16. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
  17. Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
  18. Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
  19. Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
  20. Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
  21. Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
  22. Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
  23. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
  24. Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
  25. Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
  26. Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
  27. Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
  28. Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
  29. Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
  30. Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
  31. Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
  32. Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
  33. Eingegangene Schriften
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