Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

[astrum]

From NY Times:

..[E]xposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us. That’s one reason we deplore the dumbing-down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we don’t all read very much that we would count as great literature, but we’re apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways we fall short of excellence. Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?

See more here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...ter/?src=rechp


What do you think? Do you think that reading great literature has made you a better person, in any way?

[Charles Darnay]

Great or difficult literature is not designed to make you a better person. Those who read Joyce, Proust, Milton, &c. for the sole reason of cultural capital - to say "well I have expanded my mind: WORSHIP ME!" tend to be terrible people. It's what we take away from literature that can make us better people - that comes from us alone, not the work. Literacy is important: that there is no getting around. Being able to form coherent sentences and read paragraphs for comprehension - but you hardly need Shakespeare for that. It is how much we can analyze a work that "develops our minds" - whatever that is. The truth is, you can draw on your critical analytic skills whether you read Tolstoy or certain posts on Reddit. There is a dumbing down of the curriculum (in N. America at least) - but it is not because we are removing challenging books from the curriculum: it is because we are rooting out the parts that force students to use their analytic skills, to question the world around them.

As far as expanding your imagination or refining your social and moral sensibilities: again, there are a lot of great books that give insight into the sensibilities of people at a certain time. There are great books that open up a new world. But just picking them up and reading them won't make you a moral person, or socially better, or more imaginative. You have to work on these skills (and teach these skills to children) - and again, "great literature" is just one vehicle.

[stlukesguild]

Nobody has ever denied that Sigismondo de Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, had excellent taste. He hired the most refined of quattrocento architects, Leno Battista Alberti, to design a memorial temple to his wife, and then got the sculptor Agostino de Duccio to decorate it, and retained Piero della Francesca to paint it. Yet Sigismondo was a man of such callousness and rapcity that he was known in life as Il Lupo, The Wolf, and so execrated after his death that the Catholic Church made him (for a time) the only man apart from Judas Iscariot officially listed as being in Hell—a distinction he earned by trussing up a Papal emissary, the fifteen-year-old Bishop of Fano, in his own rochet and publicly sodomizing him before his applauding army in the main square of Rimini.

Robert Hughes- The Culture of Complaint

The example of the Nazis, a great many of whom had the most impeccable taste in art, music, and literature... should be enough to lay waste to the naive notion of the moral value of art... or rather the notion that reading great literature, looking at great paintings, and listening to great music will make one a "better" person.

[ennison]

Better? At what? Reading? Playing chess a lot makes you better at chess. Playing football (soccer to yous ewes) a lot makes you better at playing football. You don't become a better person by being a brilliant chess player. Fischer is an example. Lots of great soccer players are dysfunctional ar&:£@/es. Lots of widely read folk are loopy. Lots of great writers are effin nutters.

[cafolini]

Pop, goes the weasel.

[Ecurb]

Better? At what? Reading? Playing chess a lot makes you better at chess. Playing football (soccer to yous ewes) a lot makes you better at playing football. You don't become a better person by being a brilliant chess player. Fischer is an example. Lots of great soccer players are dysfunctional ar&:£@/es. Lots of widely read folk are loopy. Lots of great writers are effin nutters.

I agree with you that the key question is, "Better at what?" Nonetheless, chess makes you not only better at chess, but better at concentrating for extended periods of time, planning tactics, etc. Playing football makes you not only better at football, but better at kicking other balls, better at running long distances, and (perhaps) better at visualizing cooperative tactics quickly and accurately in other endeavors.

Reading great literature probably makes us better at reading. I'll bet it makes us better writers, too. It probably makes us better at some other things as well.

[PeterL]

Great literature does not make us better. The world is predetermined; we are what we were born to be, and that includes reading the literature that we read. There are people who have engaged in self-delusion to the point that they believe that they decide that courses of their lives, but they are mistaken.

[Darcy88]

Yes, I believe my study of philosophy and sacred texts has made me a "better," more moral person. Epicurus, Epictetus, Emerson, Thoreau, the Dhamapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching, the New Testament...... writers and works like these have played essential roles in my intellectual and spiritual development. Novels much less so, but wisdom literature for sure.

[PeterL]

Yes, I believe my study of philosophy and sacred texts has made me a "better," more moral person. Epicurus, Epictetus, Emerson, Thoreau, the Dhamapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching, the New Testament...... writers and works like these have played essential roles in my intellectual and spiritual development. Novels much less so, but wisdom literature for sure.

Was it the literature or pre-existing causes that made you what you think is better, and then there is the matter of what "better" means in this use.

[Darcy88]

Was it the literature or pre-existing causes that made you what you think is better, and then there is the matter of what "better" means in this use.

It is a little absurd to believe that the kind of literature I mentioned has no effect on one's morals. If I had read Mein Kampf as many times as I've read Emerson's Essays and at the impressionable age at which I read them I would probably be much different, much less of a good person. Some books can unalterably change you. The Brahmins who studied the Upanishads day in and day out eventually became living breathing reflections of the content of that text. Same with Buddhists who endlessly recite the sutras. When I was 16-20 years old Plato and Emerson and other such estimable figures were like Gods to me, their words to be read repeatedly and actively incorporated into my everyday life. They undoubtably changed me. I was a much different person before I started intensively studying the world's philosophical traditions.

[Shevek]

The conflation of literature with moral/spiritual/intellectual betterment is a Victorian invention. This is of course not to claim that people in the West before the nineteenth century did not recognize the value of literature, but the notion that any person could pick up a book and improve themselves is more of a cultural value than something inherent to literature. It was one way of getting working class people to aspire to middle class recreational life, and for the middle class to affirm their own dominance. It didn't really work, since taverns and other vices obviously continued to exist (sometimes workers visited mechanics' institutes and taverns during the same evening), but it long remained a marker of class identity.

So I reject the question. It is absurd to think you are better because of what you have read, just like it is absurd to think you are better for the clothes you wear or the car you drive. These things might improve your life but you can't ask them to improve it for you. And if I really wanted to improve my social sensibilities there are easier and more effective ways of doing so these days than reading. Being literate and relatively economically privileged, it is probably pretty easy for me to say this, but like Charles Darnay said, literacy is separate from self-improvement.

[Delta40]

One can hardly move in the 'right' circles if they haven't read the 'right' books can they? In this respect, of course literature can make you a better person!

[Shevek]

It is a little absurd to believe that the kind of literature I mentioned has no effect on one's morals. If I had read Mein Kampf as many times as I've read Emerson's Essays and at the impressionable age at which I read them I would probably be much different, much less of a good person. Some books can unalterably change you. The Brahmins who studied the Upanishads day in and day out eventually became living breathing reflections of the content of that text. Same with Buddhists who endlessly recite the sutras. When I was 16-20 years old Plato and Emerson and other such estimable figures were like Gods to me, their words to be read repeatedly and actively incorporated into my everyday life. They undoubtably changed me. I was a much different person before I started intensively studying the world's philosophical traditions.

So are people who live in North Korea worse people because they are constantly exposed to hate-mongering propaganda? They would surely be different people if exposed to different artistic influences. But can we judge their individual characters based on what they are exposed to?

[Darcy88]

So are people who live in North Korea worse people because they are constantly exposed to hate-mongering propaganda? They would surely be different people if exposed to different artistic influences. But can we judge their individual characters based on what they are exposed to?

I know nothing about North Korean propaganda nor the North Korean people themselves. But I don't see the difference between a parent telling their child not to lie or steal and the kind of moral edification a person can get from a deep study of the Dhammapada.

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” - Emerson

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” - Wilde

[Shevek]

I know nothing about North Korean propaganda nor the North Korean people themselves. But I don't see the difference between a parent telling their child not to lie or steal and the kind of moral edification a person can get from a deep study of the Dhammapada.

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” - Emerson

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” - Wilde

But those quotations don't suggest that reading books makes a person better, just that reading fundamentally changes a person. Whether you decide to act on your parents' instructions, or the claims of any book, is separate from the source of your morality. Somebody can have a warped view of the world after reading Mein Kampf, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are a bad person.