An Introduction to Literature - 9e - Introduction.pdf - po ang - Januszek66

Introduction

Why Literature Matters

In the opening chapters of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854), the Utili-

tarian politician Thomas Gradgrind warns the teachers and pupils athis“model”

school to avoid using their imaginations. “Teach these boys and girlsnothingbut

Facts.Factsalonearewantedinlife,”exclaimsMr.Gradgrindtotheschoolmaster,

Mr. M’Choakumchild. To press his point, Mr. Gradgrind asks “girl number

twenty,” Sissy Jupe, whose father performs in the circus, to deﬁne a horse. When

she cannot, Gradgrind turns to Bitzer, a pale, lifeless boy who “looked as though,

if he were cut, he would bleed white.” A “model” student of this “model” school,

Bitzer gives exactly the kind of deﬁnition to satisfy Mr. Gradgrind:

“Quadruped.Graminivorous.Fortyteeth,namely,twenty-fourgrinders,foureye-

teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring; in marshy countries, sheds

hoofs.”

Anyone who has any sense of whata horse isrebelsagainstBitzer’slifelessversion

of that animal and against the “Gradgrind” view of reality. Like The GrinchWho

Stole Christmas, or like Dickens’s own Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol ,

Gradgrind wants to kill the irrational spirit; he wants to deal only with material

things that can be bought and sold and with qualities that can be measured and

counted. As these ﬁrst scenes of Hard Times lead us to expect, in the course of the

novel the fact-grinding Mr. Gradgrind learns that human beings cannot live on

facts alone; that it is dangerous to stunt the faculties of imagination and feeling;

that, in the words of one of the novel’s more lovable characters, “People must be

amused.”Throughthedownfallofanexaggeratedenemyofimagination,Dickens

reminds us why we like and even need to read literature.

Over the ages, people like Gradgrind have dismissed literature as a luxury, a

frivolous pastime, or even a sinful indulgence. Pretending to agree with theGrad-

Writing is not literature

unless it gives to the reader a

pleasure which arises not

only from the things said, but

from the way in which they

are said.

—STOPFORD BROOKE

grinds of the world, Oscar Wilde asserted that“allart

isquiteuseless”;butbythisWildewassuggestingthat

beauty and pleasure are the sole aims of the arts,

including imaginative literature. Others (including

Dickens himself) have argued for a kind of middle

ground between the positions of a Gradgrind and a

Wilde, insisting that literature should and does

instruct as well as entertain.

Wonderfully, instruction and delight often go hand in hand in our experience

of literature: we learn from what delights us or what leads us to appreciate new

kinds of delight. The pleasure of reading comes in many varieties, however, and

sometimes the best pleasures require an effort that beginners tend to call pain. A

lot of the writing that is called literature is at ﬁrst difﬁcult for any readertograsp.

But if we read literature only for pleasure, why would we bother with any pieceof

writing that requires such effort? One answer is that new kinds of pleasure open

2 INTRODUCTION

up through that effort. As we challenge ourselves toreadmoredifﬁcultliterature,

webecome able toextendourselvesfurther,muchlikeathleteswhotrainforheav-

ier weights or longer jumps with repeated practice.

Another answer came from Wilde himself, for whom literature is of supreme

importance precisely because it frees us from the utilitarian preoccupations and

activities of daily life. We value literature (all art, really) for breaking the rules of

the ordinary. In some kinds of written entertainment, we ﬁnd immediate

“escape,” but even imaginative writing that is more difﬁcult to read and under-

stand than a John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell novel offers escape of a sort: it

takes us beyond familiar ways of thinking. A realistic story, poem, or play can

satisfy a desire for broader experience, even unpleasant experience; we can learn

what it might be like to grow up on a Canadian fox farm, for example, or to

clean ashtrays in the Singapore airport. We yearn for such knowledge in a very

personal way, as though we can know our own identities and experiences only

by leaping over the boundaries that usually separate us from other selves and

worlds. As even Wilde might have conceded, literature seems extremely useful in

this respect.

Ultimately, it is impossibletoseparateknowledgefromimaginationorinstruc-

tion from pleasure. For many ages, different peoples have afﬁrmed that while

imaginative writing may be like playing, such play is the closest we come to grap-

pling with the complexity of life. Perhaps nothing is more important; perhaps

literature is the very thing humanity can least afford to do without. Literature

itself provides many examples of characters or even real peoplewhogainafeeling

of mastery, meaning, and purpose through learning to read and to write. Take a

famous episode in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). Malcolm X, in prison,

with only an eighth-grade education, realizes he needs to learn standard written

and spoken English if he is to succeed as a leader. He begins by copying every

word in the dictionary and soon moves to absorbing the books on history and

religion in the prison’s extensive library. Whatwere thefruitsofthislabor?“Ihad

never been so truly free in my life....[A]newworld opened to me, of being able

to read and understand. ” Literacy and a wide knowledge of literature of various

kinds can be a sort of franchise, like the vote, and can launch a career.

Literature is the human

activity that takes the fullest

and most precise account of

variousness, possibility, com-

plexity, and difﬁculty.

—LIONEL TRILLING

You may already feel the power and pleasure to be

gained from a sustained encounter with challenging

reading. Then why not simply enjoy it in solitude, on

your own free time? Because reading isonlyoneofthe

activities involved in gaining a full understanding of

literature. Literature has a history, and learning that

historymakesallthedifferenceinthepleasureyoucan

derive from literature. By studying different kinds of literature, or genres, as well

as different works from various times in history and from various national

traditions—by becoming familiar with the conventions of writing a sonnet in sev-

enteenth-century England or of writing a short story in 1920s America—you can

cometoappreciateandevenloveworksthatyoumighthavedislikedifyousimply

read them on your own. Discussing works with your teachers and otherstudents,

and writing about them, will give you practice in analyzingthem ingreaterdepth.

A clear understanding of the aimsand designs ofa story,poem,orplayneverfalls

like a bolt from the blue. Instead, it emerges from a process that often involves

comparing this work with other works of its genre, trying to put into words how

WHAT IS LITERATURE? 3

and why this work had such an effect on you, and responding to what others say

or write about it.

Yet studying literature involves more than cultivating your own skills and

insights. Reading can open worlds and change a person’s life, but literature also

has the potential for political effects. The international best-seller Uncle Tom’s

Cabin (1852), for example, helped create such strongantislaverysentimentsbefore

the U.S. Civil War that Abraham Lincoln reportedly described its author, Harriet

Beecher Stowe, as “the little lady who started the big war.” The personal and the

political effects of literature intertwine. A sense of self and an identity as part of

a group or a nationality are shaped and reinforced by respected traditions, and

many groups and nations now try to recover and protect their own literary

traditions rather than be misrepresented by the writings of others. Margaret

When other people tell your

story, it always comes out

crooked.

—CHIPPEWA ELDER

Atwood hasclaimedthatwhenCanadianliteraturewas

ignored, for instance, Canada itself seemed tohavefor-

gotten its identity. Since the 1970s, Canada and many

other former colonies of European countries have

recovered and developed thriving literatures of their

own. Instead of one canon —or a single selective list of the most-recognized or

most-esteemedworks—therearenowmanycanonsofliteraturewritteninEnglish.

“The Canon”

As you begin your college-level study of literature, a debate rages all around you

about“thecanon.”Althoughthisdebatehasmanydimensions,itisoftenreduced

to questions about which authors should be included in literature courses and

anthologies: why Dryden and Pope but not Aphra Behn; why Ralph Ellison and

not Zora Neale Hurston; why Joseph Conrad or Doris Lessing and not V.S. Nai-

paul or Bessie Head? Whom we publish and teach matters, because our choices

convey certain messages about the many kinds of people who have made an art

of writing. There are many more people who have expressedthemselvesinwriting

than you will be able to read in your lifetime, let alone your college career or this

semester.Anyanthology,anyliteraturecourse,leavesoutfarmorethanitincludes.

The anthology you hold in your hands represents a diverse array of authors both

ancient and modern, but it does not treat an assortment of types of authorsasan

end in itself. The works included here are good —each after its kind is a splendid

creation—but of course such a judgment of quality requires some supportingevi-

dence. As you read, you can gather the most telling evidence, identify your own

standardsforjudgingtexts,deﬁneyourownapproachestointerpretingthem,and

ﬁnally decide for yourself whether these works belong in the book or in your

personal “canon.”

Debates about the canon and about whom we should include on the list of

literary “greats” won’t end soon, largely because such arguments are part of a

discussion as old as literature itself. And even the notion of “literature” has had

an interesting history.

What Is Literature?

Before you opened this book, you probably could guess that it would containthe

sorts of stories, poems, and plays you have encountered in English classes or in

4 INTRODUCTION

the literature section of a library or bookstore. The three genres of imaginative

writing that we select for The Norton Introduction to Literature form the heart of

literature as it has been deﬁned in schools and universities for over a century. The

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) deﬁnes literature as “writing which has claim to

consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect.” The key

elements in this deﬁnition may be writing —after all, the words literature and letters

have roots in common—and beauty and emotion . But we sometimes use the word

literature to refer to writing that has little to do with feelings or artful form, as in

“scientiﬁc literature”—the articles on a particular subject—or “campaign litera-

ture.” And at least some of the nonﬁctional works studied in literature class-

rooms—MartinLutherKingJr.’s“LetterfromBirminghamJail,”forexample—were

originally intended as “campaign literature” of one sort or another.

Literature is not things but a

way to comprehend things.

—NORMAN N. HOLLAND

Could literature, then, include anything written?Or

could it include works that do not depend on written

words,suchasstagedperformancesorworksrecorded

on media such as videotape or ﬁlm? Every societyhas

forms of oral storytelling or poetry, and some peoples do not write down the

cherished myths and traditions that are their “literature.” If you go on to take

more classes in literature or to major in English or another language, you might

encounter texts that stretch the concept of literature still further: Web sites or

electronic games, for example.

The concept of “literature” as we know it is fairly new. Two hundredyearsago,

before universities were open to women or people of color, a small male elite

studied the ancient classics in Greek and Latin, never dreaming of taking college

coursesaboutpoetryorﬁctionordramawritteninthemodernlanguagesinevery-

day use. Before modern literaturebecamepartofthecollegecurriculum,theword

literature itself had to be invented. At ﬁrst, it referred to the cultivationofreading

or the practice of writing (“he was a man of much literature”). Only later did it

refer to a specialized category of works. Over time, this category narrowed more

and more, eventually designating only a special set of imaginative writings, par-

ticularly associated with a language and nation (as in “English,” “American,” or

“French” literature). Roughly speaking, by 1900 a college student could take a

course in English literature, and the syllabus would exclude most nonﬁctional

forms of writing, from travel writing and journalism to biography, history, or

philosophy. Although students at the time would havereadwidelyinthesegenres

ofnonﬁction,thecurriculumin“Englishliterature”hadbecomeawalled-inﬂower

garden ﬁlled with works of beauty, pleasure, and imagination, and its walls held

fast for most of the twentieth century.

National literature is now

rather an unmeaning term;

the epoch of world literature

is at hand, and everyone

must strive to hasten its

approach.

—J. W. GOETHE

Butnow,asyoubeginthisintroductiontoliterature

in the twenty-ﬁrst century, the walls ofthatgardenare

coming down. Literature today generally encompasses

oralandevenvisualforms(ﬁlmandvideobeingclosely

related to drama, of course), and it takes in, as it did

long ago, writings of diverse design and purpose,

including nonﬁction. Asatwenty-ﬁrst-centurystudent

of literature, you may feel the pleasure of reading the

best imaginative writings of the past, hoping with the speaker of Keats’s “Ode on

Melancholy” to “burst Joy’s grape against” your “palate ﬁne”—to test your palate

or taste for the beauty of language and form. Obviously, the garden reserved for

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT LITERATURE 5

beautiful poetry, ﬁction, and drama is ﬂourishing; this anthology is testament to

itscontinuedhealth.Buttheﬁeldsbeyondtheunwalledgardenarewildandinvit-

ing as well.

Since there has never been absolute, lasting agreement about what counts as

literature, we might consider instead how and why we look at particular forms of

expression. A song lyric, a screenplay, a supermarket romance, a novel by Toni

Morrison or Thomas Mann, and a poem by Walt Whitman or KatherinePhilips—

each may be interpreted in literary ways that yield insights and pleasures. Honing

your skills at this kind of interpretation is the primary purpose of this book and

most literature courses. By learning to recognize how a story, poem, or play

works—not only how it is beautiful and pleasurable but also how it is effective —

you should gain interpretative skills that you can take with you whenyouexplore

zones outside the garden of literature.

Thinking Critically about Literature

From the start of your ﬁrst encounter with a literary work, you begin the process

of literary criticism as you formulate questions about the mode ( is this ﬁction? is it

a novel? ), the manner ( who is the narrator? is the style modern, funny? ), and the aims

of the text ( is it satiric? is the reader supposed to sympathize with the main character? ).

To read the text well, you need to pick up on signals about the way the text is

formed,andalmostassoonasyouhavenoticedthesesignals,youbegintoexplain

what they might mean. Your critical reading of a work could start with a simple

catalog of its elements: you could name the characters; retell the action; identify

the meter and rhyme scheme. Bywritingtheseobservationsdown,youmightﬁnd

newdetailstoobserveintheprocess.Yourreadingandwritingaboutaworkcould

advance a step further with the help of literary terms, such as stanza, narrator,

metaphor, because these terms conveniently and quickly identify speciﬁc effects

andhelptoconnectthemtosimilartechniquesorfeaturesofotherworks.Agood

reader quickly moves from noticing details of a work to interpreting the signiﬁ-

canceofthewayelementsarecombinedinthisparticularwork.Apracticedreader,

further,comparesthisworktoothers,recognizingthecharacteristicsof,say,realist

novels or lyrics about love, and noting how this particular example distinguishes

itself from others of its genre. Whenever you read, you make crucial assessments

of this sort, perhaps even subconsciously.

If you have made a good mental picture of the work and noted your detailed

observations, you have laid the foundation of good critical reading and writing.

Yet a description of details is not enough for an essay of literary criticism. As a

student in a course on literature, you will be discussing works of literature with

your class and writing interpretations of these works, to be read by classmates,

your instructor, perhaps a parent or friend. Remember that your reader will want

to learn something from your essay that is not in plain view on a ﬁrst reading of

theliterarywork.Criticism,inotherwords,becomesworthwhilewhenitexpresses

something unexpected or debatable about a work. This does not mean that good

criticism consists of an extreme interpretation based on your own personal feel-

ings. To be persuasive, your critical writing needs to support your impressions

with the sort of evidence—suchasthe detailsthatyouhavenotedinpreparation—

that will convince others to share your impressions. You will need to argue a case

for your interpretation; often the heart of your argument is that the speciﬁc evi-

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