By R.V. Young, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)

This study guide takes up the following 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.

R. V. Young is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. He is the author of At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (ISI Books) and co-founder and joint editor of the John Donne Journal. His other books are Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, a bilingual edition of Justus Lipsius's Principles of Letter-Writing (with M. Thomas Hester), and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Literature.

Download Full Guide (Pdf, 202KB)

Introduction: 

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 rôle 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.

Comments (2)

Show/Hide comments

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment