Does Literary Criticism Matter?
A colleague of mine recently published an article in Dickens Quarterly. In it, he reads the three ghosts of A Christmas Carol as more reflective of the fairies of pre-Christian Britain than any post-pagan, yuletide, Victorian spirit. He writes that this interpretation lets us see, among other things, how “the spirits act as voices for marginalized people, a role perfect for fairies who are similarly peripheral creatures” (446).
The piece got me thinking about whether Dickens was aiming to graft the old pagan traditions, in a sort of reverse-Beowulf, back onto the firmly established Christian ones, by which they’d been supplanted over a thousand years before. Some sixty-odd years prior to A Christmas Carol, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon had expressed sympathy for the pagan ways of life that had been squelched by the Church after it had gained dominance during the reign of Constantine. Was it possible that Dickens was tapping into this sentiment?
Before I could answer, another question came to mind: what’s the point of such study, which is usually called literary criticism? The answer, at one time in my life, seemed obvious enough — a given, something taken for granted — to someone like me, who went to school to study English. But since then, colleges and universities have shifted their focus — and their funding — to STEM and other, more career-oriented, fields. If these are the emphases moving forward, if the main purpose of higher education is to train the future workforce for specific, skill-based jobs, where does literature fit, if at all, both in the classroom and beyond it?
Students often come into my English courses not just fearful that they’ll have to write but that they’ll have to read — and not just read, but read novels like The Great Gatsby. There’s always a sigh of collective relief when I tell them that no, we won’t be reading Gatsby, though doing so has value. While they can appreciate this “value” in the abstract, they enrolled to study nursing, business, tech, or engineering. They have neither the time nor the bandwidth to dissect some old story with no apparent connection to their lives.
In some ways, I can’t blame them. I’d feel the same in their position, and I want them to leave the course feeling like they’ve learned something useful, namely, how to conduct basic research and express themselves clearly in writing. But I also wish I could elaborate on what I mean when I say there’s “value” to the study of literature. That I haven’t already speaks to my need to write this essay: how can I explain it to my students when I haven’t even explained it to myself?
One reason for the difficulty is that I haven’t made literary criticism a priority in recent years. My motivations, both for writing and for teaching, have been spurred by current events and the polarization that has resulted in large part from our fragmented media sphere. There were — and there still are — more important things to do than closely read a poem by T.S. Eliot, such as making sure democracy survives. Whether, if at all, my personal and professional work has had any impact is open to question. I still must try, regardless, or I’m no better than those who seek to undermine what remains of our institutions and of common decency itself.
But in responding so viscerally to the news, so flooded with shit as it’s been these last few years, I’ve lost sight of the ways literary criticism can help us retain our humanity. By “literary criticism,” I don’t mean the pointless, dick-wagging kind that still occurs in graduate courses, with its empty, long-stale references to différance and, though apt, the signification of the phallus. Instead, I mean something more basic — the act of reading a text (regardless of its “canonical” status) with an eye to what it does and says. I mean looking at its plot, character, setting, narrative, and historical context, and making meaningful connections between these elements and ourselves and our own world.
For instance, in my colleague’s reading of Dickens’ Christmas tale, “the spirits act as voices for marginalized people.” It’s one thing for students to hear about the struggles faced by members of communities other than their own. It’s another thing entirely for them to put faces, even fictional ones, on those community members, to see them not in the abstract but as people — to get perspective other than the one handed down to them by authority. At the same time, it’s empowering for students who belong to marginalized communities to see their lives reflected in writing. In either case, the challenging of dominant, usually one-sided narratives allows for the possibility of positive, meaningful change. If this weren’t so, there would be no need for several states to try to prevent it from happening in classrooms. We’re talking about something much bigger than just reading books.
Rather than stifling discussions of issues like these, we should be using them to foster empathy, a quality tragically lacking in most of our public discourse. Writing in College English last year, Michael Fischer sees the potential such conversations about literature have when, “[w]ith guidance from receptive instructors…students and faculty experience the respectful disagreement missing in our fractured politics.” He concludes by acknowledging, however, that this would only be the start of something much bigger:
I am not saying these discussions are sufficient. I am insisting they are necessary. They provide a lifeline to an alternative kind of community, a reminder of what can still be possible, that our students, “drowning in conflict” desperately need. These discussions can keep alive the endangered “habits of the heart” to borrow Alexis de Tocqueville’s phrase, that democracies depend on.
In such “an alternative kind of community,” unlike on social media or even at the dinner table, we have at least the possibility of growth through the “respectful” acknowledgement of difference.
The value of literary criticism, then, lies in its ability to help us make meaningful connections, ask difficult questions, and begin to see others, especially those who are different from us, empathetically. This is no new insight, though it’s one I’d long forgotten. That it took me so long to remember is sad — and I may not have recalled it at all had it not been for my colleague’s article — but at least I had the chance to gain (and regain) it. Today’s students deserve to be taught skills that help them find good-paying jobs. But they also deserve the same chance I had to learn something whose benefits may not be as readily apparent, but which are equally important in a democracy that lives up to its name.
