When ChatGPT can analyse Hamlet in addition to any grad pupil, we would moderately ask, “What’s the level of writing papers on Hamlet?” Literary evaluation, in any case, is just not like constructing homes, feeding individuals, or practising medication. Even in comparison with its sister disciplines within the humanities (e.g., historical past or philosophy) the examine of literature serves little sensible want. And, apart from, when machines can construct homes as simply as individuals, we can’t want individuals to construct homes both.
So, why can we train English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary colleges now name it) in any respect? In accordance with the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the aim of learning and educating literature is “to know the perfect that’s recognized and thought on this planet, and by in its flip making this recognized, to create a present of true and recent concepts.” … English literature was, in fact, an alternative choice to faith. We wished individuals to be good, however we now not believed in God. As a substitute, we believed in Shakespeare, Milton, and finally Toni Morrison. Till we did not.
It is at all times been problematic, although, this concept that literature makes you a greater individual. In addition to the plain counterfactuals—the allied troopers allegedly discovered copies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works within the desk drawers of Nazi jail guards after they liberated the camps—there have been the issues that at all times come up whenever you attempt to push your faith on different individuals.
Our faith was literature, and like every individuals of true religion, we deeply believed in it, thought it was important, thought everybody have to be saved by way of it. The outstanding factor was that we one way or the other satisfied American school presidents of the thought, however then once more, a lot of them, like College of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, creator of the “Widespread Core” and advocate of “Nice Books,” have been members of the identical faith. Not all international locations make college students of arithmetic and engineering take literature programs, however in america we do. So for practically a century, we evangelised our faith to school college students, a few of whom have been already in love with studying and due to this fact blissful to worship on the Temple of Literature. Many weren’t, however, nonetheless, we rammed Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison down their throats—to make them higher individuals.
That does not imply that it essentially stayed with them…. Some college students of the proper temperament and with the proper mental predilections are drawn to the Temple of Literature, however most should not. For many, it’s like going to Sunday college—they endure it reluctantly and rapidly neglect any classes discovered.
