Learning Literature
“Poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no reason to think that they could be suitable objects of ‘research.'”
“Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or ‘researched’ by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of ‘first level,’ an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more ‘sideways on’ or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the ‘arts.'”
