How to engage with books

Literary criticism needs a revival, but Michael Mack’s assertion that literature is ‘disruptive’ and his suggestion that it should be analysed for how it can help us cope with life won’t do. by Sarah Boyes

It’s become common today to avoid direct critical contact with literature. Instead, novels and poetry tend to be considered at a distance, for what they reveal about when they were written or how they might illuminate various fashionable issues. Texts have become detached from robust criticism. The role of the serious, independent literary critic with their own orientation in the world, part of a critical culture which holds writers up to clear standards, has fallen away – often seen as an outmoded, elitist bourgeois affliction best blotted out. The results are far from desirable. Contemporary literature in particular has fallen prey to cod theorising and superficial reviews advising people whether or not to consume it. Literary theory, not in itself a bad thing, has ballooned into an amorphous and highly confusing category as theorists try to validate literature in non-literary and increasingly arcane terms. The underlying failure to engage with novels in a critical and more public-facing way leads to a failure to articulate a meaningful theory of literary value. It means being unable to say why literature is important and worthwhile as a distinctive art form. How Literature Changes The Way We Think, by Michael Mack, has become caught in this unfortunate state of affairs. Mack’s aim is baldly stated: to challenge ‘the common paradigm underlying much of our current approach towards arts and humanities’. He wants to show how literature does more than simply reflect the world, a phenomenon he calls ‘flat mimesis’. This idea - that the humanities passively represent the world - has apparently been the dominant way of thinking about the arts historically, from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant and up to Martha Nussbaum. The rest at SRB