The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [14]
Assessment is certainly one of the integral components of criticism, whether it takes the form of a review, a critical article, a book, or a decision whether or not to publish (or reprint). But the rise of this vocabulary and the accompanying bureaucratic—often computerized—processes measuring outcomes and impact of qualitative fields using quantitative methodology has arguably raised the stakes for use in ways that are inappropriate for literature and the arts. This shift has been further compounded by the economic crisis and the insistence on justifying investment and resources in the humanities using the same set of problematic keywords.
The outcome of a work of literature might occasionally be an obscenity trial and the consequent expansion of understanding about free speech, or stream of consciousness, or artistic integrity—or even, in a few rare cases, the fomenting of a revolution. In a more ordinary material sense, perhaps the outcome of a literary work would be publication or production, with or without a suitable monetary reward. But these are not the primary meanings of words like assessment and outcome when they are deployed in the context of an institutional review. As we have already noted, poems and novels do not have answers that are immutably true; they do not themselves constitute a realm of knowledge production. Instead, they raise questions, they provoke thought, they produce ideas and generate arguments, they give rise to more poems and more novels. The impact of a poem might be answered with Emily Dickinson’s phrase about feeling that the top of her head has been taken off, but this is not a reliably replicable result. And yet scientists and social scientists will often join poets, writers, critics, and general readers in saying that literature and the arts are what they are saving the world for.
Concurrent with the national debate about standards and assessment is the question of rhetoric and its power to sway and to persuade. Traditionally, aspiring politicians were encouraged to study literature, oratory, and rhetoric, in the same way that aspiring generals studied famous battles: to know the history, the terrain, and the moves. From Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the great orators of our time have been inspired by the reading of literature—inspired not only in the cadences and references of their own speeches and books but also by the way “words in their best order” made for logic, tautness of formulation, and powerful, effective figures of speech. But modern eloquence is often met with a sense of distrust, criticized as elite and not representative of the average American. It is symptomatic of the current popular ambivalence about the arts of language that Barack Obama’s rhetoric became a flashpoint for both the left and the right.44 For some listeners, his facility with language was itself suspect, while others, stirred by his words, felt visceral pleasure and deep emotional engagement.
The reemergence in the late twentieth century of politicians and world leaders who are also accomplished and honored writers, like Václav Havel, attests to the possibility of a creative synthesis between writing and politics. In a similar way, the public and political use of a work of classic literature, like the printing and distribution of a million free copies of Don Quixote by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’s novel, suggests the pleasures and the dangers of the literary in a world that, like Quixote’s, often seems both out of sync and out of joint.45
The Art of Making Nothing Happen
The uses