Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap

93 Pages·2022·1.517 MB·English

by  Charles F. Altieri

Literature, Education,
and Society
In today’s classrooms, educators specializing in literature and the arts
have found themselves facing an escalating crisis. Most obviously,
they encounter serious budget cuts, largely because students tend in
increasing numbers to prefer majoring in disciplines that provide clear,
practical knowledge and the promise of relatively lucrative careers.
These educators have addressed the crisis by stressing how the arts can
also provide valuable forms of knowledge by testing moral values and
by developing the skills of critical thinking required to understand the
cost of apparently perennial social problems. Literature, Education,
and Society offers a fresh strategy by focusing not on knowledge but
on how literature and the arts provide distinctive domains of expe-
rience that stress significant values not typically provided by other
disciplines. Practical disciplines tend to treat experiences as instances
for which we learn to provide interpretive generalizations, making
knowledge possible and helping us establish concrete programs for
acting in accord with what we come to know. But the arts do not
e ncourage generalizing from particulars. Instead they emphasize how
to appreciate the particulars for qualities like sensitivity, i ntensity,
and the capacity to solicit empathy. In order to dramatize this cru-
cial difference, this book distinguishes sharply between a focus on
“experience of” what solicits knowledge and a focus on “experience
as” which encourages careful attention to what can be embedded in
particular experiences. Then the book characterizes the making of
art as an act of doubling, where the making fashions some aspect of
experience and invites self-conscious participation in the intensity
provided by the particular work. After exploring several aspects of
doubling, the book turns to the vexed question of ethics, arguing that
while this theory cannot persuade us that the arts improve behav-
ior, its stress on art’s purposive structuring of experience can affect
how people construct values, something essential to education itself.
Charles F. Altieri is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, California.
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For more information about this series, please visit: www. routledge.
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Literature, Education,
and Society
Bridging the Gap
Charles F. Altieri
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Charles F. Altieri
The right of Charles F. Altieri to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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ISBN: 978-1-032-39316-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-39317-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34916-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003349167
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
Preface vii
1 The Gift That Keeps Giving: Why Education in
the Arts Matters 1
2 Appreciating Literary Fictions 25
3 Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Revisited: The
Ecstatic “Is” as Bridge between Aesthetics
and Ethics 45
Afterword 78
Index 83

Preface
In thinking about this “Preface”, I realized that I had never in any
of my books acknowledged my gratitude for the luck of having had
great Professors all through my education. So, I want now to thank
Father Duffy and Mr Kapler from Regis High School; William
Forest, Cornelius Novelli, Katharine Hanley, and Fathers Daniel
Berrigan and Donald Monan from Le Moyne College; and Forest
Read, George Mills Harper, Peter Philias, and Albrecht Strass
at the University of North Carolina, in addition to countless col-
leagues who have assumed mentoring roles at SUNY Buffalo, the
University of Washington, and UC Berkeley. Special thanks go to
those who co-taught with me—Carl Dennis at SUNY, Steve Sha-
viro at UW, and both Lyn Hejinian and Maura Nolan at Berkeley.
I always felt C.D Blanton as a co-teacher standing always behind
me. Then there are the students whose memorable questions were
demanding and suggestive, and whom I dearly miss. This will prob-
ably be my last opportunity for such acknowledgements, so I am
very pleased that this occurs in a book ultimately about what teach-
ing literature can solicit as a sense of values.
I must finally recognize publically my luck in having the intellec-
tual companionship Carolyn Porter has offered me for more than
thirty years. I am immensely grateful to her for her unwavering
support, incredibly careful reading of my work, and often brilliant
and funny supplements to or queries about what I was trying to say.
Writing became a lot easier and more rewarding when it could seem
a dialogue with her.

1 The Gift That
Keeps Giving
Why Education in the Arts
Matters
The current parlous situation of the arts and the humanities in
most American colleges and universities poses some intricate and
interesting problems. On the one hand, those who appreciate what
education can produce in these fields have to find ways of contest-
ing prevailing attitudes on the part of those who do not share their
educational background. On the other hand, those proponents of
the arts and humanities have to face the fact that those in control
of university resources increasingly think they have to accept the
marketplace as an arbiter of competing interests. If one allocates
resources in terms of enrollments and degrees, humanistic disci-
plines are getting exactly what they deserve. Why should idealis-
tic claims about educating the whole person prevail over practical
concerns to shorten time in academic pursuits and emphasize skills
needed in the marketplace?
Here, I can speak only about imaginative writing and the disci-
plines that constitute study in the visual arts. I limit myself because
I think proponents of education in the arts, to whom this book is
addressed, now have to meet three conditions, so they had better
know what they are talking about. First in literary study at least
we have to heed Michael Clune’s arguments clarifying why cur-
rent trends of moralizing and politicizing the arts fail to change
social situations: they only emphasize cognitive values despite the
likelihood that any plausible defense of education in the arts has
to articulate competing models of judgment and understanding
that are better attuned to essential features of social life and the
intricate needs of self-consciousness.1 Yet, I think there is a huge
miscalculation in how he envisions this attunement. For he argues
that we have to show that literary experience produces its own ver-
sions of knowledge claims that provide enhanced capacities for all
sorts of practical judgments. I challenge this claim because I think
it distorts how literary experience can modify our relations to the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003349167-1