American Literature

 We live our lives as stories  or as narratives as literary scholars prefer to say. The fictional stories that become part of our cultural fabric and social mythology both reflect our lives the plots of novels and storied lives of fictional characters influence our lives and resemble them too. We have much to learn from closer study of literary narratives. Stories edify us. (Rodden, 2008, p. 149  150).

A justification of literary studies depends in the final analysis of illustrating the relevance of literature of thinking and living in modernity.  Alexandrov 2007, p. 97 asserted that at least in the English speaking world, a widespread, and perhaps dominant, view today, is that literature is a social construct or a readers projection and thus a mystification  in the sense that of being a signifier attached to phenomena that do not deserve the exclusivity that the signifiers genealogy bestow.  Several criticisms and agreement supports the assertion. For instance, as Alexandrov 2007, p. 97 noted E.D. Hirsch Jr. claim that it is a mistake to assume that poetry is a special substance whose essential attributes can be found throughout all those texts that we call poetry.  And further citing Eagleton (p.97) who insisted that there is no essence of literature whatsoever and that literature is constituted by value judgments that are historically variable and that have a close relation to social ideologies. However Jonathan Culler (p.98) postulated that the essence of literature is to have no essence, to be protean, indefinable to encompass whatever might be situated outside it.  Finally, it is Raymond Williams who concluded that the category of literature is so deeply compromised that it has to be challenged in toto (Fekette, cited in Alexandrov 2007, p. 97-98).

Garber 2003 cited in Taggart 2006 p. 206 charted the rise and fall of literary study which around in the 1950s accordingly had occupied the comfortable middle ground of the humanities, and then in its heyday collaborated with anthropology, history, and continental philosophy to investigate language in action(literature). Garber defended literary studies from the encroachment from natural science on one front and empirical history on the other.  She holds that the field of literary studies retains its unique value so long as it stays true its main function scrutinizing literariness.

Garber held further on the domain and value of literary studies. She substitutes human nature for literature as the appropriate object domain of literary studies. According to her literature has a place in taking up in influential evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilsons On Human Nature (1978) and Sociology (1980) and aims to reclaim human nature for humanities.  Accordingly it has been said that since humanistic knowledge has for the most part been discounted in modernity, art is often reduced to mere form or ornamentation.  On tracking Wilsons occasional citations of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, William Shakespeare and Sappho, among others, Garber noted that art merely expresses the truth of biology in a pithy, condensed form and need not be interpreted. 

On the other hand the allure of historical correctness is that history grounds and tells the truth about literature and it forecloses our asking literary questions. Garbers literary qualm with literary historicism is that it presumes a crude mimeses and is unable to answer fundamental question such as why we read and teach literature in the first place.  History is within literature (one of Garbers examples is the clock striking in Shakespeares Julius Caesar) in the sense that text presents the relation between the present and the past and the current preoccupation driving that juxtaposition or reinterpretation. And the literary within history in that anachronism foregrounds themes, structures, and form rather than chronology.  As Gerber argued further that literary scholarship is an endless search and re-search to fill in all the gaps and to have a complete picture of a work in its historical context, literary criticism can a be a creative enterprise that follow the associative thinking, the fits and starts of a text which shocks us into an awareness that something about literature exceeds rational, scientific, and historical determinations (Garber 2003, cited in Taggart 2006 p. 209).

    In Farrels Why Does Literature Matter cited in Taggart 2006, p. 210 he claimed that literature does much than explore language and power because it affords wide moral experiences of various proportion of literary space such as phenomenology and metaphysics, experiences not available in the market place, and does it so in an exceptional manner.

    Another compelling issue on real world benefit on the study of literature as whole is literatures role in psychological and social phenomenon. In the social aspects of literature Schram and Steen, 2001 p. 1 contended that there is self-evident relation between literature and other arts. The empirical study of literature is concerned with the central questions of literature as a cultural practice interpretation and evaluation of individuals, description of groups of texts (e.g. authors, genres, periods, histories, languages, countries, cultures), often from a comparative perspective,  and theory formation, that is, formulation of generalizations across (groups of) texts irrespective of the individual cases. One example is a focus on text or its relation to context, such as the biography of the writer, the cultural conditions for production and reception, and so on. Further, David Miall explored the idea that literature has survival function for humans as biological organisms and uses the perspective of evolutionary psychology to construct his argument (Schram and Steen, 2001 p.1-3).

    Moreover in literary reading there is  distinction between the construction of meaning  which takes place in all language use  as oppose to the creation of meaning, which may be restricted to more imaginative forms of reading. Psycho-analysts claim that function of literature is to celebrate hidden fantasies, either attack is on theoretical grounds or methodological grounds, the effect would be to engender further critical discussion between psycho-analysis and the empirical study of literature. A related classic theory of the function of literature, referring to another psychological effect of literary reception is one of catharsis. It is not just the readers of literature who participate in a more general culture, but the writer of literary texts is embedded in such a context too (Schram and Steen, 2001 p.7-11).

    Literature is the expression of beauty or the manifestation of ideology, intrinsically rewarding or extrinsically interesting, the medium through which cultural and national tradition is transmitted or patently subversive of tradition (Taggart, 2006, p. 207). In rhetorical reading, there is intellectual pleasure of thinking through and with literature and the political potential to change the world (Garber 2003 cited in Taggart 2006, p. 206). Berube 1988 cited in Taggart 2006 p. 208 said institutionalized literary study is an academic subject and as a profession, simply will not exist very much longer if it does not demarcate, for its potential clients its domain and procedures. Literary theories offer novel and persuasive account of signification (Culler 1985 cited in Taggart 2006, p. 205) and young students need to ask not only what the text means, but as well how it means (Brooks 1994 cited in Taggart 2006, p. 205).

    Farrels most interesting premise as Taggart, 2006, p. 213 highlighted is that the rich experiences had exclusively and exceptionally in some literary, indeed in literary works, are valuable for the sake of living well. Farrel envisioned some works as providing exercises in establishing richer psychological and ethical subjectivity. As Taggart emphasizes, it is not just that we see characters going through kinds of ethical decision-making we become aware more reflectively of our patterns of identification and investment, of the ways in which we set ourselves in relation to and ethical world.  Further, Farrels realism which does not stress the mimetic relation of the word to world, here concerns not just seeing but actively becoming aware of the similarity of one mental state  t he characters  the readers. In this case, realism means that the rich way we experience things in literature is the way we could experience things in the world literature is a means to the moral end of the self unfolding in all its richness within the world and across a life (Farrel 2004, cited in Taggart, 2006, p. 213).