"Should Literature Be Useful?"

Lee Siegel asks a provocative question in this New Yorker piece, and answers it even more provocatively- he believes that literature is essentially useless, and celebrates it for being so. Siegel examines two scientific studies that found that exposure to literature makes people more sensitive to other people's emotional states and argues that this isn't necessarily a positive thing. Here are 34 words to help follow this interesting argument. Should Literature Be Useful? From: The New Yorker, November 6, 2013
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. empathetic
    showing ready comprehension of others' states
    Two recent studies have concluded that serious literary fiction makes people more empathetic, and humanists everywhere are clinking glasses in celebration.
  2. impalpable
    not perceptible to the touch
    But I wonder whether this is a victory for humanism’s impalpable enrichments and enchantments, or for the quantifying power of social science.
  3. methodology
    the techniques followed in a particular discipline
    The methodology was roughly the same in both studies.
  4. derive
    come from
    The subjects were asked either to describe their emotional states, or instructed, among other tests, to look at photographs of people’s eyes and try to derive from these pictures what the people were feeling when the photographs were taken.
  5. hearten
    give encouragement to
    The results were heartening to every person who has ever found herself, throughout her freshman year of college, passionately quoting to anyone within earshot Kafka’s remark that great literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.”
  6. gratify
    make happy or satisfied
    The studies’ conclusions are also particularly gratifying in light of the new Common Core Standards, hastily being adopted by school districts throughout the country, which emphasize non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature.
  7. debunk
    expose while ridiculing
    Here at last, it seemed, was a proper debunking of that skewed approach to teaching the art of reading.
  8. skewed
    having an oblique or slanting direction or position
    Here at last, it seemed, was a proper debunking of that skewed approach to teaching the art of reading.
  9. sentiment
    a personal belief or judgment
    “He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day”: though Benjamin Franklin was fairly indifferent to money himself, the sentiment he expressed in that bit of advice became a hallmark of the national character.
  10. anathema
    a formal ecclesiastical curse accompanied by excommunication
    Idleness is still anathema in American life.
  11. idle
    not in action or at work
    (Kim Kardashian, who has restlessly turned her idle time into a profitable industry, is a Puritan at heart.)
  12. puritan
    someone who adheres to strict religious principles
    (Kim Kardashian, who has restlessly turned her idle time into a profitable industry, is a Puritan at heart.)
  13. didactic
    instructive, especially excessively
    From the didactic McGuffey Readers that lasted from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century to William Bennett’s “Book of Virtues” in our own time (a liberal response, “A Call to Character” by Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl, was published a few years later), the American impulse to make room for literature by harnessing it to a socially useful purpose has taken many forms.
  14. archetypal
    of an original pattern on which other things are modeled
    You might even say that the two archetypal fictional American characters, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, invented by the country’s most scathing satirist, are essentially arguments for the superiority of idleness over any morally, socially or financially useful American activity.
  15. scathing
    marked by harshly abusive criticism
    You might even say that the two archetypal fictional American characters, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, invented by the country’s most scathing satirist, are essentially arguments for the superiority of idleness over any morally, socially or financially useful American activity.
  16. ardent
    characterized by intense emotion
    Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy.
  17. algorithm
    a precise rule specifying how to solve some problem
    Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy.
  18. inculcate
    teach and impress by frequent repetitions or admonitions
    Yet while the McGuffey Readers and their descendants used literature to try to inculcate young people with religious and civic morality, the claim that literary fiction strengthens empathy is a whole different kettle of fish.
  19. discerning
    having or revealing keen insight and good judgment
    Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure.
  20. refined
    cultivated and genteel
    Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure.
  21. fulcrum
    the pivot about which a lever turns
    Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure.
  22. finesse
    subtly skillful handling of a situation
    It can also enable someone to manipulate another person with great subtlety and finesse.
  23. magnanimous
    noble and generous in spirit
    Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states.
  24. bombastic
    ostentatiously lofty in style
    Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states.
  25. devoid
    completely wanting or lacking
    Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states.
  26. treacherous
    tending to betray
    If he were half as empathetic as Iago, he would be able to recognize the jealousy that is consuming his treacherous lieutenant.
  27. vanquish
    defeat in a competition, race, or conflict
    The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations.
  28. machination
    a crafty and involved plot to achieve your ends
    The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations.
  29. misanthropic
    hating mankind in general
    Empathetic identification with the ordeals suffered by Apuleius’s golden ass, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Shakespeare’s King Lear—a play Dr. Johnson wanted to be performed with a revised, happy ending because he said its spectacle of suffering was too much to endure—Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Alyosha, or Prince Myshkin, Emma Bovary, not to mention the protagonists of misanthropic modernists like Céline, Gide, Kafka, Mann, et al.-empathetic sharing of these characters’ emotions could well turn a person
  30. beneficent
    doing or producing good
    Yet even if empathy were always the benign, beneficent, socially productive trait it is celebrated as, the argument that producing empathy is literature’s cardinal virtue is a narrowing of literary art, not an exciting new expansion of it.
  31. exulting
    joyful and proud especially because of triumph or success
    When Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he wasn’t complaining; he was exulting.
  32. multifarious
    having many aspects
    Fiction’s multifarious nature is why so many people have attributed so many effects to imaginative literature, some of them contradictory: catharsis (Aristotle); dangerous corruption of the spirit (Plato); feverish loosening of morals (Rousseau); redemptive escape from personality (Eliot); empowering creation beyond the boundaries of morality (Joyce).
  33. nuance
    a subtle difference in meaning or opinion or attitude
    It speaks its own private language of endless nuance and inflection.
  34. quotidian
    found in the ordinary course of events
    That is freedom, and that is joy—and then it is back to the quotidian challenge, to the daily grind, and to the necessity of attaching a specific meaning to what people are thinking and feeling, and to the urgency of trying, for the sake of love or money, to profit from it.
Created on Wed Nov 06 21:11:16 EST 2013 (updated Fri Nov 08 14:23:53 EST 2013)

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