The CEA Forum

Summer/Fall 2007: 36.2

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Book Review:

Roche, Mark William. Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.

by Heather Marcovitch, University of Windsor

It is a question that both students and teachers of literature are faced with regularly: does literature matter anymore? Why bother studying literature, a discipline that, to the world outside the university, is seen as a hobby whose function, at best, is to instill critical and writing skills that could be applied in a “real world” (i.e., non-literary) position? In the university, literature and the rest of the humanities are under fire to justify their purpose and their demands for university money in competition with seemingly more practical and lucrative disciplines. Mark William Roche in his book Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century sketches out not only a defense of literature but a call to the practitioners of the discipline to return to a less discipline-specific, more broadly humanistic criticism of literature.

Does literature matter in the 21st century? Roche poses this question in his title, but the more compelling problem his book articulates is whether literature exists in an increasingly technological, utilitarian and alienating age. Texts abound, to be sure, but Roche maintains that literature is an essential quality in writing that links its readers to the ideas and spirit of the world around them. The pursuit of literature is an ethical pursuit, says Roche, not because literature is compelled to make didactic claims upon its readers, but because it forces its readers out of the isolation and solipsism created by the modern age.

Indeed, in the second chapter, Roche claims that literature “makes visible for us the absolute” and this claim is the basis for both his harsh words about the current state of poststructuralist criticism—especially cultural studies and deconstruction—and his assertion that literature, particularly the works of “great literature” that are often under fire in the canon wars, is the ideal discipline for posing questions about humanism and humanity in an increasing technological age. In the technological, utilitarian and alienating world in which we live, studying literature may well be the optimal way to keep us connected to each other and to our environment.

Roche makes his argument about the value of literature alongside an assertion that postructuralist criticism, as both a scholarly and a pedagogical method, is inadequate. If literature connects us spiritually, emotionally, and ethically to our world, then poststructuralist schools of criticism, with their distrust of frameworks and metanarratives, their insistence on relativistic ways of reading and their privileging of “text” over “literature,” has mimicked the alienation of the modern age, while taking very few effective steps to overcome it. For this reason, Roche claims, we need to re-evaluate our poetics of criticism. While he is careful to qualify his argument, reiterating that some poststructuralist criticism has intrepretive value (albeit in a limited fashion), Roche stresses that the failure of this criticism is its dismissal of what he sees as the eternal and ethical in literature. By distrusting the large assumptions and frameworks that foreground ethics and by reducing literature to a cultural construct, Roche claims that poststructuralism suffers greatly from a misreading of what literature is.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Moral Principles of Literature and Literary Criticism” is the most provocative part of the book, since Roche, with his claim that literature functions primarily (though not exclusively) as a moral teacher, teeters at times on the brink of the reactionary criticism that is often so distasteful to literary scholars. Roche, to his credit, emphasizes that literature's value as an arbiter of morality lies in its ability to raise both moral and aesthetic questions in its readers and, echoing the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin and John Henry Newman and hearkening back to Kant, argues that the aesthetic components of a great work of literature, namely style and form, enable the reader to refine his or her taste and thus pave the way for a consideration of the ethical lessons he believes are present within a literary work. He in fact goes into great detail discussing the different aesthetic components that make up a work of art—literally the good, the bad and the ugly—stressing that a work of art is an autonomous work which is nonetheless connected, even in an oblique way, to the world in which it is created. Moreover, following the writings of Heidegger, he argues that what makes literature art and what makes art a worthwhile pursuit of study is the presence of an ineffable quality that appeals to the imagination rather than to reason. “Art,” he writes, “addresses the imaginative, emotional, and subliminal parts of the self that motivate the soul more than mere argument does” (25). Roche's valuing of the complexity of art forms the basis of his critique of current scholarly practices, which he sees as a reductive practice oversimplifying the literary work to fit particular political ideologies. Indeed, in the third chapter, he proposes a pedagogical method that considers the work of literature as having a “unifying dimension” (58) and argues that teaching the student about analyzing parts of the text as offshoots of a central unity teaches them analytic skills applicable to real-world problems.

I read this section with a great deal of enthusiasm, but also with a bit of anxiety. The focus on a work of literature's unifying component, aesthetic beauty and connected relationship to the world outside of it echoed a great deal of what I as a teacher strive to convey to my students. I am a lover of some highly canonical works for that very reason—I think they are wonderful books that achieve that very complexity and multivariance that Roche claims defines the work of art. I believe that most professors of English have, to varying degrees, these principles of literature in mind when they enter their classes. And, like Roche, I have little patience for oversimplified misreadings of texts. But, unlike Roche, I do not see it as necessarily a systemic fault of poststructuralism, but rather the result of bad readings. Like any theory, postructuralist schools of thought have their strengths and their limitations—they are theories, not dogma—and perhaps the fault lies with the practitioners who do not make this discernment. And this is where the anxiety sets in, for there are also many equally-wonderful works of literature that have, for one reason or another, been eclipsed by the canon. Although Roche is careful throughout this section not to unequivocally devalue the non-canonical works, namely the works by previously-marginalized voices that have appeared on course syllabi only relatively recently, his argument strongly suggests a wholehearted return to the traditional canon. I wonder whether there is room in his new literary world for works that do not meet all of the traditional canonical requirements. Art, as he reminds us, is based on taste, and although taste can be learned to a great degree, the very complexity of art that he extols demands an accompanying complexity of taste. In other words, can we not find the same aesthetic value in a Romantic poem not written by one of the Big Six? Or a British modernist work not created by a member or associate of the Bloomsbury group?

In the second and third parts of the book, which discuss literature's value in a technological age, Roche makes a compelling argument for both the relatedness between literature and technology and for the important differences between them. He argues that the technological age is suffering from an ethical crisis; its utilitarian framework dictates that technological models focus on method rather than ethics, the how rather than the why. Furthermore, the “informational saturation” (138) of the technological age emphasizes quantity over quality, as I am sure any number of research forays on public Internet sites has reminded most of us, as well as giving our culture a poetics of isolation and solipsism. For the reasons he outlined in the first section, Roche claims that the study of literature is necessary to at once counteracting the more isolating elements of the technological age and possibly affecting future transformations in the content of our modern technological texts. For literature, Roche claims, is about connectedness—the relationship that forms between reader and author, between author and the environment, and ultimately between the reader and his or her natural and social surroundings. As he reminds us, “Literature enriches us partly through its intrinsic value, partly as a result of its ability to address neglected values, partly through its simple vitality” (207).

Literature's value then resides precisely in its lack of utilitarian function. Roche sees it as a link to nature, as a tool to help us form a collective identity, as a means to enable us to step outside the solipsistic tendencies that our culture encourages. And this is precisely why he sees why literature matters and where the importance of teaching literature lies. By focusing on aesthetics, particularly the appeal to those non-utilitarian faculties of emotion and imagination, by teaching students to become judges of quality and to deepen their ethical capabilities, the study of literature can address some of the more pressing problems of the technological age.

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