You cannot blame the humanities for being on the defensive. As many English majors can tell you, the economy does not always have ready use for the humanities. In this article, Sarah Skwire gives her take on why literature is worthwhile:
Reading Each Other
Yet, the argument that literature makes us more sympathetic, more humane, seems facile to me. First of all, as the author of the link below shows, we are often off-base in our understanding of characters as adolescents. Our own missing information is reflected back to us in our interpretation of the text, and so misconceptions linger. Secondly, good literature often alienates us, and that can be good, too. Lolita comes to mind. Or Crime and Punishment. My own (current) thesis is that while books can evoke emotion, that is not why they are good. Their value to us, and to our students, has more to do with what they let us see, which is a related but different thing. Great authors can see an emotion you have had, but never been able to describe, or the way two people act around each other when they are mad, that you have known but never noticed. The pinnacle of this for me is when students understand that well-crafted sentences are carefully-aimed cameras, and then use this purposefully in their own writing. Of course, the whole idea hangs on a questionable axiom: to see better is to act better. Which brings me back to Lolita.
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