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    A Student's Guide to Literature
    A Student's Guide to Literature
    A Student's Guide to Literature
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    A Student's Guide to Literature

    By R.V. Young

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    About this ebook

    Explore the works of Western literature that have stood the test of time—and discover titles to enrich your own book collection.

    A Student’s Guide to Literature takes up these questions: In a time of mass culture and pulp fiction, can great literature still be discerned, much less defended? Why is literature so compelling? What should we read? Literary scholar R. V. Young addresses these timely issues in this guide to Western literature and poetry. He demonstrates that literature liberates the mind from cultural and temporal provincialism by expanding our intellectual and emotional horizons. Learn how great fiction and poetry are integral to a liberal education, and visit the classic works of literature again—or for the first time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781497645073
    A Student's Guide to Literature

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      Book preview

      A Student's Guide to Literature - R.V. Young

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      THE PRESTON A. WELLS JR. GUIDES TO THE MAJOR DISCIPLINES

      EDITOR 

      Jeremy Beer

      PHILOSOPHY  Ralph M. McInerny

      LITERATURE  R. V. Young

      LIBERAL LEARNING  James V. Schall, S.J.

      THE STUDY OF HISTORY  John Lukacs

      THE CORE CURRICULUM  Mark C. Henrie

      U.S. HISTORY  Wilfred M. McClay

      ECONOMICS  Paul Heyne

      POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY  Harvey C. Mansfield

      PSYCHOLOGY  Daniel N. Robinson

      CLASSICS  Bruce S. Thornton

      AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT  George W. Carey

      RELIGIOUS STUDIES  D. G. Hart

      THE STUDY OF LAW  Gerard V. Bradley

      NATURAL SCIENCE  Stephen M. Barr

      A Student’s Guide to Literature

      R.V. YOUNG 

      WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

      CONTENTS

      Introductory Note: The Paradox of Literature

      A Student’s Guide to Literature

      Bibliographical Appendix

      INTRODUCTORY NOTE: THE PARADOX OF LITERATURE

      LITERATURE IS PARADOXICAL both in its nature and in its effect upon readers. Although letters inscribed upon a page or the words of a spoken utterance are the media of a literary work, the work itself is neither the ink and paper nor the oral performance. A successful poem or story compels our attention and seizes us with a sense of its reality, even while we know that it is essentially (even when based upon historical fact) something made up—a fiction. The most memorable works of literature are charged with significance and cry out for understanding, reflection, interpretation; but this meaning carries most conviction insofar as it is not explicit—not paraded with banners flying and trumpets blaring. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, says John Keats.¹ The role of literature in society is similarly equivocal. It can be explained simply as entertainment or recreation; men and women have always told stories and sung songs to amuse themselves, to pass the time, to lighten the burdens of real life. At the same time, literature has assumed a central place in education and the transmission of culture throughout the history of Western civilization, contributing a sense of communal identity and shaping both individual and social understanding of human experience. The intimate part played by literature in cultural tradition has been a source of alarm to moralists and reformers from Plato to the media critics and multiculturalists of our own day.

      Literature, then, must be approached both with caution and abandon. A primary purpose of the study of literature is to learn to read critically, to maintain reserve and distance in the face of an engaging, even beguiling, object. And yet, like any work of art—a symphony, for example, or a painting—a novel or an epic yields up its secrets only to a reader who yields himself to its power. It is for this reason that literary study is a humane or humanistic discipline, not an exact or empirical science. The ideal researcher in the physical sciences, insofar as he sticks rigorously to science, will be absolutely objective in the sense that his humanity will exert no influence on his methods or conclusions. Even a medical researcher will be interested in the human body only as a biological mechanism, not as the outward manifestation of a person with a soul. The literary scholar must of course be objective in the sense that he is disinterested; he must not have an individual or personal stake in the interpretation. And yet, although the critic’s fate is not the fate of King Lear, the critic’s human sympathy with the plight of that tragic protagonist is part of his critical response to the play as literature. The human compassion of the cancer researcher for the victims of the disease, while it may be an important motive, is not part of his research, not an element in his science as such. The natural sciences, therefore, provide a very poor model for scholarship in the humanities. To be sure, there are factual, scientific elements of great importance to inquiry in all the arts: a knowledge of Elizabethan stagecraft and printshop practices can furnish a good deal of useful information about how Hamlet was seen by contemporaries and how the text was preserved, but such facts will never explain why the play is still moving and important. Works of literature are not natural phenomena or specimens; they are rather part of the cultural fabric of the world that we all inhabit. A poet, says William Wordsworth, is a man speaking to men.² We cannot approach poets and poems as an entomologist approaches ants and ant hills.

      Literature is vast and complex; a guide of this length can only be a modest sketch of the subject.

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