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By Root 852 0

of “pleasure,” but rather as a way of thinking. That is why, in my view, it is high time to take back the term literature. To do so will mean explaining why reading—not skimming for information or for the plot (or for the sexy, titillating “good parts” of a novel or a political exposé)—is really hard to do; and why the very uselessness of literature is its most profound and valuable attribute. The result of such a radical reorientation of our understanding of what it means to read, and to read literature, and to read in a “literary” way, would be enormous. A better understanding of these questions is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.

Literature Then and Now

The word literary does not appear in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Though based on the substantive literature, which—as we’ve seen—itself originally meant “humane learning,” literary evolved, from the eighteenth century to the present, as something between a compliment and an epithet. Like other, similar concepts and terms, this one changed as its context changed. From the qualitative categories of “literary merit,” “literary reputation,” and “literary education” (all eighteenth-century usages) to the social and economic realms of “literary dinner,” “literary lunch,” “literary circle,” “literary agent,” and “literary executor” (all hallmarks of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture), the uses and fortunes of literary have fluctuated and either evolved or devolved depending upon one’s view. When fewer persons were literate in the most basic sense, that is, able to read, a person of literature or literary training was a prized, if undercompensated, member of society (Oliver Goldsmith: “A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched”).9

The nineteenth century made celebrities of some of its writers. Dickens and Wilde toured triumphantly in America, while “Longfellow … largely paid the poet’s penalty of being made the lion of all the drawing rooms.”10 (A characteristic modern version of this “lionization” is a handbook called Sleeping with Literary Lions—which, despite its title, is not a hookup service but a guide to U.S. bed-and-breakfasts located near literary landmarks.) Today novelists and poets are read and praised, but by a smaller subsection of the population, since they now compete with films, television, the Internet, and other modes of cultural leisure.

“America’s favorite book,” according to a Harris poll that sampled just over 2,500 people, is, unsurprisingly, the Bible. As the proponents of the Butler Act in the famous Scopes trial controversy about evolution learned, not everyone will agree about what the Bible is, but let us put that question aside for a moment. The second favorite for men is The Lord of the Rings; the second favorite for women, Gone with the Wind. Others in the top ten include J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Stephen King’s The Stand, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.11

Even with a tiny sample, this is a dispiriting list, suggesting that after high school (where To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye remain on required reading lists), what used to be known as “canonical literature” is nowhere in sight.

But what is the use of literature? Does it make us happier, more ethical, more articulate? Better citizens, better companions and lovers? Better businesspersons, better doctors and lawyers? More well-rounded individuals? Does it make us more human? Or simply human? Is what is being sought a kind of literary Rolodex, a personal Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations of apt literary references (“To be or not to be?” “Only connect”; “Do I dare to eat a peach?”)—phrases that can be trotted out on suitable occasions, at the dinner table, or on the golf course? Such literary taglines or touchstones were once a kind of cultural code of mutual recognition among educated