Trying to finish up Mark Edmundson‘s 2004 book, Why Read. He writes, as others have done, on the value of reading the greats in literature, on his distain for various forms of literary theory — especially when it comes to Foucault as well as Critical Theory – and the continuing need to challenge college students with questions about life, truth and what he calls the ‘Final Narrative’: “the ultimate set of terms that we use to confer value on experience.”
The student, according to Edmundson,
. . . is taught not to be open to the influence of great works, but rather to perform facile and empty acts of usurpation in which he assumes unearned power over the text.
And later he argues that “we professors have given our students the language of smug dismissal” . . . a “reflexively skeptical stance that touches the borders of nihilism.”
If you set theory between readers and literature — if you make theory a prerequisite to discussing a piece of writing, you effectively deny the student a chance to encounter the first level of literary density, the level he’s ready to negotiate. Theory is used, then, to banish aspiring readers from literary experience that by rights belongs to them.
As a postmodernist-in-recovery, and while resisting the pull of theory is still a day-to-day struggle — the “why I blog part” — and while I think his critique of Foucault et al. is, well, facile in itself, I am taken by his pleading with us to be “ignorant” in the face of great literature, to call everything you value into question, and to hold out the possibility of revising your “Final Narrative”. All this appeals to my, ahh should I say it, romantic nature.
Edmundson wants to us to first confront literature with a sense of having “lost our way”, to hold up on the secret sauce of theory and critique, until we’ve ‘experience’ the work as it is, to live within the author’s intentions, culture and circumstances until it speaks back to us, until we are properly in a position to ask, is this the way I should be, or live my life.
A good approach it seems to me, not only for literature, but for all of the things we choose to give our precious time to read.
