Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

By GREGORY CURRIE You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us. Thats one reason we deplore the dumbing -down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we dont all read very much that we would count as great literature, but were apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways we fall short of excellence. Wouldnt reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities? If someone now asks you for evidence for this view, I expect you will have one or both of the following reactions. First, why would anyone need evidence for something so obviously right? Second, what kind of evidence would he want? Answering the first question is easy: if theres no evidence even indirect evidence for the civilizing value of literary fiction, we ought not to assume that it does civilize. Perhaps you think there are questions we can sensibly settle in ways other than by appeal to evidence: by faith, for instance. But even if there are such questions, surely no one thinks this is one of them. What sort of evidence could we present? Well, we can point to specific examples of our fellows who have become more caring, wiser people through encounters with literature. Indeed, we are such people ourselves, arent we? There is scant evidence that reading great literature morally improves us. I hope no one is going to push this line very hard. Everything we know about our understanding of ourselves suggests that we are not very good at knowing how we got to be the kind of people we are. In fact we dont really know, very often, what sorts of people we are. We regularly attribute our own failures to circumstance and the failures of others to bad character. But we cant all be exceptions to the rule (supposing it is a rule) that people do bad things because they are bad people. We are poor at knowing why we make the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from one choice to another. When it comes to other people, can you be confident that your intelligent, socially attuned and generous friend who reads Proust got that way partly because of the reading? Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find in literature?

Theres an argument we often hear on the other side, illustrated earlier this year by a piece on The New Yorkers Web site. Reminding us of all those cultured Nazis, Teju Cole notes the willingness of a president who reads novels and poetry to sign weekly drone strike permissions. What, he asks, became of literatures vaunted power to inspire empathy? I find this a hard argument to like, and not merely because I am not yet persuaded by the moral case against drones. No one should be claiming that exposure to literature protects one against moral temptation absolutely, or that it can reform the truly evil among us. We measure the effectiveness of drugs and other medical interventions by thin margins of success that would not be visible without sophisticated statistical techniques; why assume literatures effectiveness should be any different? We need to go beyond the appeal to common experience and into the territory of psychological research, which is sophisticated enough these days to make a start in testing our proposition. Psychologists have started to do some work in this area, and we have learned a few things so far. We know that if you get people to read a short, lowering story about a child murder they will afterward report feeling worse about the world than they otherwise would. Such changes, which are likely to be very short-term, show that fictions press our buttons; they dont show that they refine us emotionally or in any other way.

We have learned that people are apt to pick up (purportedly) factual information stated or implied as part of a fictional storys background. Oddly, people are more prone to do that when the story is set away from home: in a study conducted by Deborah Prentice and colleagues and published in 1997, Princeton undergraduates retained more from a story when it was set at Yale than when it was set on their own campus (dont worry Princetonians, Yalies are just as bad when you do the test the other way around). Television, with its serial programming, is good for certain kinds of learning; according to a study from 2001 undertaken for the Kaiser Foundation, people who regularly watched the show E.R. picked up a good bit of medical information on which they sometimes acted. What we dont have is compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy. Not nearly enough research has been conducted; nor, I think, is the relevant psychological evidence just around the corner. Most of the studies undertaken so far dont draw on serious literature but on short snatches of fiction devised especially for experimental purposes. Very few of them address questions about the effects of literature on moral and social development, far too few for us to conclude that literature either does or doesnt have positive moral effects. There is a puzzling mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic and the state of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes dont overrate the evidence they dont even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is. Now, philosophers are careful folk, trained in the ways of argument and, you would hope, above these failings. Its odd, then, that some of them write so confidently and passionately about the kinds of learning we get from literature, and about the features of literature that make it a particularly apt teacher of moral psychology. In her influential book Loves Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum argues that the narrative form gives literary fiction a peculiar power to generate moral insight; in the hands of a literary master like Henry James, fiction is able to give us scenarios that make vivid the details of a moral issue, while allowing us to think them through without the distortions wrought by personal interest. Im not inclined to write off such speculations; it is always good to have in mind a stock of ideas about ways literature might enhance our thought and action. But it would be refreshing to have some acknowledgment that suggestions about how literature might aid our learning dont show us that it does in fact aid it. (Suppose a schools inspector reported on the efficacy of our

education system by listing ways that teachers might be helping students to learn; the inspector would be out of a job pretty soon.) Im confident we can look forward to better evidence. Im less optimistic about what the evidence will show. Here, quickly, is a reason we already have for thinking the idea of moral and social learning from literature may be misguided. One reason people like Martha Nussbaum have argued for the benefits of literature is that literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in complexity. Literature turns us away from the simple moral rules that so often prove unhelpful when we are confronted with messy real-life decision making, and gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake. Literature helps us, in other words, to be, or to come closer to being, moral experts. The problem with this argument is that theres long been evidence that much of what we take for expertise in complex and unpredictable domains of which morality is surely one is bogus. Beginning 50 years ago with work by the psychologist Paul Meehl, study after study has shown that following simple rules rules that take account of many fewer factors than an expert would bother to consider does at least as well and generally better than relying on an experts judgment. (Not that rules do particularly well either; but they do better than expert judgment.) Some of the evidence for this view is convincingly presented in Daniel Kahnemans recent book Thinking Fast and Slow: spectacular failures of expertise include predictions of the future value of wine, the performance of baseball players, the health of newborn babies and a couples prospects for marital stability. But why, I hear you say, do you complain about peoples neglect of evidence when you yourself have no direct evidence that moral expertise fails? After all, no one has done tests in this area. Well, yes, I grant that in the end the evidence could go in favor of the idea that literature can make moral experts of us. I also grant that moral thinking is probably not a single domain, but something that goes on in bewilderingly different ways in different circumstances. Perhaps we can find kinds of moral reasoning where experts trained partly by exposure to the fictional literature of complex moral choice do better than those who rely on simple moral rules of thumb. I havent, then, in any way refuted the claim that moral expertise is a quality we should aspire to. But I do think we have identified a challenge that needs to be met by anyone who seriously wants to press the case for moral expertise.

Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading War and Peace, for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment. I have never been persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in an elite. There is such a thing as aesthetic merit, or more likely, aesthetic merits, complicated as they may be to articulate or impute to any given work. But its hard to avoid the thought that there is something in the anti elitists worry. Many who enjoy the hard -won pleasures of literature are not content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well. And thats just what we dont know yet. Gregory Currie is a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham. A version of this article appeared in print on 06/02/2013, on page SR12 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Does Fiction Civilize Us?.

LETTERS

Does Reading Fiction Make You Better?

Published: June 6, 2013

Re Does Fiction Civilize Us? (Sunday Review, June 2):

While agreeing with Gregory Currie that there is little evidence linking reading directly to behavior, I do think that there is a case to be made for the civilizing effect of fiction and literature. Human beings make sense of the world through stories, both true and imaginary ones. It is the imaginary ones that perhaps give rise to the greatest opportunity for exercising a developing moral imagination. Seeing the world not just as it is, but how it could be or ought to be. I am not suggesting a direct correlation between reading and morality, as if you could read a book and whatever the message of the book, the reader would then be fortified with a positive lesson or inoculated against a virulent problem, the one just overcome by the hero in the book. Literature doesnt work in such a direct way. At best, a good story can give rise to insights about ourselves and our world, and deepen our understanding of the human condition. And while that might not be everything, it should be enough to give literature a place of honor in our society. JUDITH ROVENGER New York, June 3, 2013 The writer is a youth services librarian.

To the Editor: Gregory Currie doesnt speak to the fact that there is so much variation between how different authors see the world that it is impossible to glean a specific morality from reading all the Penguin classics. Rather, the much more important thing we learn studying literature is how to think analytically, to make connections, to be patient and careful with our interpretations. (As a sophomore in high school, I know this firsthand from my English class.) It is this, and not some obscure, all-encompassing morality, that civilizes us, because this kind of thinking is useful far beyond the walls of an English department; it has applications in everything from engineering to politics to medicine to law. It ensures continued progress and allows our civilization to develop. HENRY ROBINSON Guilford, Conn., June 2, 2013

To the Editor: Gregory Currie asks for psychological studies to support a thesis that he questions: that fiction civilizes us. I cannot provide the quantitative data that he requests, but three novels leap off my bookshelf to support the idea that good fiction can improve our lives: Uncle Toms Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowes 1852 novel, articulated a critique of American slavery that turned many 19th-century Americans toward abolition. The Jungle, Upton Sinclairs 1906 novel, alerted Americans to the horrendous conditions in the beef slaughterhouses in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. The book shocked President Theodore Roosevelt into action. The immediate results were improved labor conditions in the stockyards and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbecks 1939 novel, detailed the plight of Californias migrant farm workers and helped build the case for initiatives that improved the lives of working Americans. JAMES TACKACH Narragansett, R.I., June 2, 2013 The writer is a professor of English at Roger Williams University.

To the Editor: It cannot be proved that literature improves morality. But I reject the entire debate. Literatures purpose is not moral; it asks questions instead of answering them, forcing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. An example: Flauberts novel Madame Bovary. Its heroine seeks solace from a dull marriage in a couple of affairs, racks up debts, then commits suicide. It is hardly an exemplary tale, but it is an unforgettable description of how such a sordid event can occur. Heroes of fiction are not always good, but they are real and believable. They populate our own imaginations and expand our understanding of ourselves and humanity. To each to decide whether such reading is worth the effort. INGRID CHAFEE Atlanta, June 3, 2013 The writer retired as an associate professor of French at Morehouse College.

How Does Great Literature Shape Us?

Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at The University of Nottingham, has a thought-provoking piece titled Does Great Literature Make Us Better? in The New York Times in which he posits that we need scientific evidence that great literature shapes the human mind (i.e., us): Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading War and Peace, for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment. I have never been persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in an elite. There is such a thing as aesthetic merit, or more likely, aesthetic merits, complicated as they may be to articulate or impute to any given work. I dont think this is something that will be measured with success for the foreseeable future. I do think great literature shapes us in ways that is impossible to quantify; it is like objectively trying to explain a piece of art. Hence, I dont disagree with this: There is a puzzling mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic and the state of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes dont overrate the evidence they dont even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is. But what if one could design an experiment to test for rigor in literatures impact. I think one NYT commenter makes a great point: The impact of great literature in developing a readers moral or emotional sense, depends on the readers current state of moral/emotional development, (maturity), and the readers efforts in assimilating the literature. And it would seem to follow that the impact of such literature would also vary in both intensity and longevity, in correspondence with the maturity and efforts of the reader. So, in order to study the effects of literature, one would have to take these two variables into account, and select a group of people whose maturity and efforts were similar enough to constitute a controlled group, and then test the impact of various literature on them, in both intensity and longevity.

Another thoughtful comment : Its not all that hard, really, even if the particular question is the wrong question why not ask Does great literature *change* us? or is finally unanswerable. The mind, or the brain if you prefer, does a great many things to get itself through the day, and literature represents more or less exotic and alien variants of these (often mundane) activities, which are made recognizable and understandable to us. We are the things that cathect, and we are evidently quite happy to invest intangibles ideas, religious beliefs, emotional constructs as well as tangible objects with mental and emotional energy. That, simply, is the ground of our fascination with literature. Literature is a form of communication that asks us to invest in ideas and worldviews that may not be our own, and to act as if they are, or could be, ours for the duration. When done well, it prods at one or more of our many limits and seeds our phenomenological ground, whatever that might mean to you. Whether this means that literature *bestows* something that we might value as good, or simply tweaks how our poor brains cope with the welter of information the world throws at them, may vary from person to person, or even from moment to moment within the same person. Aesthetic reward and moral enlightenment are not guaranteed, but nor are they forbidden or mutually exclusive. Literature gives us something in which we can invest, and then some moral or intellectual change happens, or does not. Thinking about this a bit more, and the reason I didnt title this post with the word Better in the title is because thats such an elitist view. And so, the best comment I read is this one : Professor Currie begins with an incorrect premise. The purpose of literature is not to make us morally better nor does it serve an educational purpose to teach us how to live our lives. Literature is not a how-to manual; nor should it ever be placed in the self-help section of a library or bookstore. The first purpose of literature and perhaps its over-riding reason why we tell stories belongs to the author him/herself. Why else would anyone put him/herself through the agony and ecstasy of creation in the first place? And the reason that writers write or painters paint or composers compose is to bring order out of the seeming chaos of living or reason out of the irrationality of existence. It is to make sense of what the author sees and chooses to define. As for us readers, we hopefully can share the authors vision and gain a better understanding of our planet (or galaxy) and those with whom we share it.

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I dont believe that gaining an understanding of the confusing world we live in is a moral act. I think drawing order out of chaos is a more basic human instinct. Worth reading Curries take and perusing the comments. I will reflect on this topic in a personal post Im currently composing.

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492 Comments
I'm not sure that 'better' is the right qualifier when it comes to recognizing the benefit of reading great literature. I personally think that we read great literature to LEARN about mankind -- about human nature. For example, just looking at Shakespeare, we learn about jealousy and sociopathic behavior from Othello, about envy from Julius Caesar, about not ceding power from King Lear and The Tempest, and so on. And here I think that the author of the article is on the right track when he mentions that "literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in complexity". Social sciences typically seek to isolate one strand of human nature for rigorous analysis. Great literature will never go away because it tries to put all of that multi-dimensional complexity into a portayal of human life. We need such understanding to function in the day-to-day world. Responses to two types of critics of what I am saying. If a post-modernist responds by saying that 'there is no such thing as human nature', I say: I think you are talking as you have been taught to speak in classrooms -- but I'll bet in going through life in reality you do think about 'human nature' -- or you will as you grow up. And if a psychologist says that pyshcology has supplanted literature, I say: the specialized language of the great psychologists has not supplanted the usefulness of the vernacular psychology, embodied in words and phrases like character, liar, 'they hardened their hearts' and so on.

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I agree with you, and I think these days most others would too: Books aren't moral tools, and we don't read them to become "morally enlightened." Perhaps some narratives might fold a moral or two into them, but that doesn't mean that we lift them out and add them to our moral repository. But while literature might not make us "moral experts", there is value in the complexity that some literature affords. This complexity can train us to think rigorously. We're nudged to meditate on things that might have otherwise remained in our mental peripheries. And when the author steps back and his description leaves off, we're still working hard. As we fill in the author's omissions, we cultivate our imaginations. Whether or not the reader actually does engage in this sort of mental work, though, depends at least partially on his own intellectual interest. A book in and of itself isn't all that useful. It's got to be in the right hands, too.

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"I also grant that moral thinking is probably not a single domain, but something that goes on in bewilderingly different ways in different circumstances." Yes? So that makes this whole article moot.

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The linearity of thinking is immediately obvious and dull. This sets up false dichotomies then examines them as if they're real. I feel like I'm reading a ninth grade honor roll student's paper. How did this get published?

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Literature is just to enjoy life. Just art, it has no productive purpose. Reading your article feels like watching cinema backstage programs. Thanks any way.

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Thanks for a compelling, thought-provoking read. Great literature certainly does not make anyone "better," as "better" is relative. How many of us have been snared in a corner at a party by an overeducated blowhard going on and on about Proust, Trollope, etc. and so on? You yearn for the Marx Brothers to show up. What great lit does is require the brain to reach, reach, reach, to pay attention, to comprehend. That carries over to many other tasks in life, including relating to others and to oneself. There is always a deeper level always. It is easy to ride the surface, to be black and white, than it is to continually strive for depth in a world that doesn't value depth except for a very small minority. A deep read is like deep lovemaking, too. You take your time, you marvel at the beauty of great sentences. It makes life worth living.

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The list of Nobel Lit winners encompasses many foreign authors, enriching our sense of place and historic zeitgeist. This cant help but make us more tolerant, and compassionate. But one of the best things about great books is that so many (most ?) of our best minds have come to the same conclusions about the nature of reality. It provides us underpinnings that can help us withstand the pedagogy we are daily barraged with. It is the only thing I can see that has that power. I have many friends who are scientists and it is just short of wondrous to go to plays with them and see their experiences of confronting human imagination. I have to think the people we must trust to make hypothesis about issues of our way of life, should have better educations in imaginative literature. Ive proved it to myself. Being christian,Waugh (noted above) is pushed at the Naval Academic as my son found out. Waugh, also perhaps, is good at teaching that to be a gentleman/woman is to do the appropriate thing in the appropriate circumstances. A nuclear engineer and Commander, my son is still the most gullible person you can imagine. Not enough literature. But dont stop with the classics. Read the current best minds also. Rushdies best book, Midnights Children, while tearful funny, shows, elegantly how it feels to live in India. Marquez book, 100 Years of Solitude

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shows us just how ridiculous the world would be if the crazy religious kicks people believe, were real.

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I used to teach literature. I believed then, and still believe now, that puzzling through a work of art thought students how to think. Working through a poem or novel simply develops students' abilities to work through texts. I guess--although I am sort of surprising myself--that I believe once people develop their ability to literally "think straight," they will learn how to come to morally correct solutions. Does this mean that I believe human beings are innately good? Imagine that.

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Whether great works of literature actually make someone a better person is, as this article argues, difficult to prove. Perhaps a more interesting question is: "Does reading great works of literature cause the reader to become a better person than one who reads any fictional narrative that captures their attention regardless of its recognized "greatness" in the canon of literature?" For the sake of argument, let's define 'becoming a better person' as being able to better navigate and communicate within the moral landscape of our society and the world as a whole. I would be fascinated to read studies that explored direct comparisons between receiving an education in classic, recognized literature and one in reading any fictional/non-fictional narrative of your choice regardless of its approved quality. Does it really matter what you read or that you were deeply engaged while reading it? Can you grow morally, intellectually and spiritually reading what you enjoy rather than what critics and academics enjoy? These are the most important questions in my mind and the most applicable to how we create dynamic school curriculum. If becoming a compassionate, responsible and engaged member of society is the goal, than the focus needs to be on the education that guides and stimulates the intellectual growth of our populous. Knowing if great literature matters more to education than reading in general is a significant question that deserves to be explored in depth.

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There's a big difference between enhancing ones intellectual capacity and improving ones conduct. The latter depends upon absorbing lofty principles and striving to apply them, that's why you have educated people engaging in atrocities. I think some confusion arises from the popular idea that great ability should necessarily be equated with great worth as a human being (thanks Nietzsche!). Developing some capacity doesn't ensure it being used in a benevolent way. I think there's more great literature that expands ones mind than there is that provides the means to enhance ones moral fiber.

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The writer exposes the bias of our times in the very act of examining the value of literature in terms of its "self-help" potential. Appreciation of works of mastery by individuals has been always part of the human experience. Also, remember that the "novel", as a form of literature was looked down upon as a cheap form of amusement in its infancy. Only when it reached a level of skill and depth did it begin to be taken seriously.

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Even though I grew up around many racists,after reading Invisible Man I knew I would fight against it.

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There are two parts to the answer to the question "Why read the great books?" 1. The fact that any piece of literature is described as 'great' is totally subjective, but more people will buy into that description if in fact it does have something that 'grabs' you - again totally subjective. 2. Whatever the reason, the more people that read it, the more people that find that it has something to 'grab' them, the larger is the audience with which you share the common experience of reading this specific piece of literature. It is this common experience that is the point. The ability to share a profound - and extremely personal - emotional experience with hundreds, thousands, millions of other otherwise ordinary and unconnected folk is the great gift of the 'great' books.

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It's an interesting question, but with respect to the author's approach, and I do think it deserves respect, he's overlooking some basic facts. Reading fiction that deals with complex moral issues teaches us about morality for the same reason that reading military history teaches us about war. It may not give us applicable expertise, or necessarily improve our future decisions, but it exposes us to possibilities. When we know that morality can have hidden subtleties, we're more likely to notice them. If it weren't for literature and similar art and stories, I'm not sure I would have learned this in any meaningful way. Whether or not I behave well is up to me.

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You missed one very compelling reason for people to read great literature: You will get many more of the jokes and allusions in 'pop culture' from The Simpsons to Woody Allen movies to Cole Porter to the Marx Brothers. There was a time when being well-read improved your enjoyment of Mad Magazine. Parody and satire release their full strength when you are familiar with the source references. Does it make you a better person? I don't know but you'll laugh more, and being happy is bound to make you a better person.

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Professor Currie, this is a classic example of what is known as the wrong question. All to say, the answer to the above, and as phrased, is 'No', while thanking you for engendering such a variety of interesting comments from the readers of your article.

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Playing tennis helps one to become a better tennis player. Reading War and Peace helps your reading chops. (If you can get thru those multitudinous pages in one piece, you are a rare bird indeed.) Playing the piano, practicing hard, etc., will eventually get you up to speed on Chopsticks, Heart and Soul, and beyond. But . . . not one of those activities will qualify you for performing brain surgery. On this there is no dispute. PE does not prepare you for life, but it probably helps you to live longer. War and Peace will not solve your financial woes, but it will give you a different view of that little twerp, Napoleon. (Pierre could have shot him dead, but realized it wouldn't matter.) Playing Heart and Soul with lots of heart and soul, will not prepare you to climb the Eiffel Tower in your boxer shorts in mid-winter during a Parisian snow storm. But it may help you score with the ladies. They like piano-tinklers, I am told. The point of all this obfuscation is: a lot of things in life are ad hoc. What you do helps you do what you do. Shucking oysters or shelling peas will not help you play Beethoven piano sonatas (especially his later ones), and conversely, playing his sonatas will not help you shuck oysters.QED Aw, shucks. I'm sorry. Fine literature will not make you fine.

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Great lit might make us more insightful. More moral, I'm not so sure. As to the nazis, maybe if Hitler had read War & Peace, he wouldn't have invaded the Soviet Union. What then?

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My take after a full half hour of letting the question stew is that great literature doesn't make you a better person, but reading the great books gives you a chance to be a better person. (I like the Feynman and Nabokov quotes in the comments.)

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It seems that great literature will and will not make us better people. For me great literature compliments my ideology, and gives me working examples of my faith. Great literature has an introspective nature, like classical music, that instigates self-discovery. Unless an individual is prepared for that, such books, like classical music, might be a bore. I've written a larger response here:http://seanrwatson.blogspot.com/2013/06/response-to-does-greatliteratur...

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There is no reason to assume that morality has anything to do with literature, or that it is an appropriate gauge of its value. If one needs to find a practical value to literature, which is certainly questionable, then we can at least say that it raises questions of all kinds for the reader to consider and think about. It's thinking in this very complex area of human interactions that perhaps can help us not become more moral people but rather more mature in our interactions with others.

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Gotta read this carefully later, but would ask: what's the effect of other genres on our thinking? Does scifi make us smarter and more forward-looking or willing to think more broadly about options for present-day problems? Does fantasy (Tolkien's stories, vampire and Harry Potter novels) make us superstitious or not? How do stories in a book or on video change our thinking and values? Violent TV and movies (and books?) reportedly make people less empathetic. From my own experience, the written word does more than video to put words in our heads, develop our verbal skills that carry over to speaking as well as writing. Ever notice that really long novels come from cultures with a lot of free time to pass, like long Russian nights and slow-paced English manors. Does literature favor sedentary living, as opposed to more active ways in which people pass time? There's research opportunity on such questions.

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There is considerable value to be had from reading great literature besides just knowing and experiencing it. Great literature engages the reader and brings the thoughts and experiences and imagination of the authors to the readers who can accept what is offered or not. The characters and experiences in Homer's works or in Dickens works both have a real quality to us which transcends the actual times in which the stories are set. If the reader is attentive and undistracted, great literature will introduce feelings and knowledge about things to the reader that increase the readers' awareness of things. The result is that reading great literature increases our awareness of things and sharpens our perceptions. It may not enlighten every reader but it tends to do so for most. Even though most literature is fiction it is common for those who have read great works to find analogous situations in their lives, from time to time, to those about which they have read, so it helps us to make sense of new situations that resemble those like those in the literature.

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Maybe there is another factor of influence. As we become moral experts, or any kind of expert, our choices of viewing a particular problem from multiple perspectives increase. This does not increase happiness, so instead we might be looking for a simple absolute (which is actually an extreme).

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This would explain why sophisticated German's like Frege, and many others, were looking for arguments for antisemitism and autocracies. It would also explain why so many sophisticated educated Westerns have such extreme anticapitalist or on the other hand antisocialist views, while failing to understand the valid arguments from both sides. Of course these extreme views take away the and-or nature of reality and replace it with an either-or reality.

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Well, this sorta comes down to the age-old question: Are we inherently good people? Most moral philosophers pre-suppose that we are good beings until we encounter harm which leads us to fear. If it is in our nature to be the most moral then literature would do nothing to help us. What literature or high culture (or culture generally......) does is helps us develop our personality in complex and interesting ways. If you ask even a Buddhist Abbot whether high literature is necessary, often times they will be just as puzzled as the next person. It seems like we need high literature insofar as it reminds us of our emotional and intellectual depth, but there is no end to that depth. If we presuppose that we are inherently evil beings, than literature as all knowledge, serves to guard us against that by making our actions more complex and thoughtful. If we pre-suppose, however, that I do, that we are inherently good being, high literature can only at its best remind us of that.

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Mr. Currie wonders if great literature improves our morals. The more interesting question would be to discover how we became, to the extent that we are, moral creatures at all. Here is quote from Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" -- "Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran." I should point out that Bloom means his book's title to be taken literally (if you will excuse the pun). He spends 750 pages or so to convince us that our post medieval conception of our human selves is almost entirely Shakespeare's invention. If western classical literature is responsible for our conception of morality and our notion of ourselves as moral creatures, are questions of how much morality was involved in the creation even possible? More or less relative to what?

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There is a basic misunderstanding in the article here, that seems almost intentional, about how we might want literature to work on our sense of morality. "One reason people like Martha Nussbaum have argued for the benefits of literature is that literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in

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complexity. Literature turns us away from the simple moral rules that so often prove unhelpful when we are confronted with messy real-life decision making, and gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake." Ok, so good, but that last bit, "discriminating moral agents" starts us down the wrong path. From there he goes immediately to the idea of moral experts. I don't know anyone, certainly not Martha Nussbaum, who think literature makes us moral "experts." The thing one would hope happens, from literature among many things, is that someone starts to see more complexity in the world, less black and white. More a recognition of not-knowing. Nothing of expertise. If we see different ways of looking at the world and become aware that there are many different ways of looking at the world, it does not lead automatically to better decision-making. Yet we live in a world where recognizing our not-knowing can be prized.

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Greateat literature sensitizes us to the complexity of the human condition. That sensitivity is what makes us better people.

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The title's question is answerable, if we agree that " better" can mean more sympathetic, less judgmental, and more concerned for others (but that is pretty specific). Great literature exposes us to the lives of others--their point of view, their concerns, their challenges. It lets us see what traits we all share, makes us understand how it would actually feel to experience war, slavery, degradation, or just love or envy. By immersing ourselves in others' emotions, needs and wants we are more easily able to empathize with them Though strange to do, one could measure how empathetic someone is after significant or repeated exposure to literary works. Again, this would be an odd experiment, but much less odd than trying to determine if one becomes more "moral."

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Why should literature "improve" us ? The people that love Shakespeare don't care in the least whether the bard "improves" them or not. This question can only be meaningful to someone who hasn't a clue.

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Professor Currie's essay labors through a tedious circular debate to reach an astounding conclusion about literature: that there is no creative writer who can deliver absolute moral improvement. But that's not all! He cites research on literature in the social sciences which leads the way into a more profound understanding of the human nature. The conclusion? if you read a sad story you feel bad; if you read a happy one you feel better. Of course, that doesn't mean literature makes you a better person! And of course, it doesn't make you a worse one either! Professor Currie includes Henry James among the writers who are read by "literary elitists." Most serious students of literature know that

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James crafted fictional points of view that furnish our unique perceptions of all reality. (No one sees the whole picture.) He avoided conventional moral judgements to dramatize the human struggle to meet them. And he wrote thoughtful critical prefaces to his fictions, carefully investigating motive and action from every possible angle. And yet, like many dedicated writers, Professor Currie included, James could seem too earnest; his major works were too long, too involved and too demanding in his day to be best-sellers. They had to be "studied" by a later generation. During his "major phase" he was satirized by a younger novelist as "a Hippopotamus laboring to give birth to a pea." In the end, maybe he too became a philosopher.

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I have no idea if it will make me a better person or not. I read great literature because it's fun to read. I don't get why people don't get that. It's far more entertaining that the banality of network TV, yet people are all too happy to invest hundreds of hours per year indulging in that passive medium.

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Good literature is like "intentions". You can have intentions to do good to yourself, your community, or the society as a whole. But your action can be quite the opposite. At least you now know the reasons in a more trained way.

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Yes, when I wrote this I was aware of the strict meaning of mos, moris, but its applications since Cicero have suggested variances with many including character and goodness . Thank you especially for your third paragraph.

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I am an English teacher, so of course hearing literature is going out of the window in favor of informational texts makes me very upset. That said I feel I must explain a few short points. I never would have understood the effects that suicide has on a family if I read an informational text. Judith Guest wrote Ordinary People in such a powerful way I had an empathy for families that suffer through the ordeal. I grew up very sheltered (before cable and the internet), so how wonderful was the late Brother George Roth when he exposed me to the writings of Alice Walker. Again I never would have gained out of an informational text what I did from The Color Purple. I saw the family life of African Americans AND females in that society. Many times in my life I would repeat to myself the sayings of the great Atticus Finch to not judge someone until I walked a mile in their shoes. I could go on and on about how literature has helped shape me into the woman, mother, wife, and teacher I have become and I truly believe that a curriculum of only non-fiction will not be beneficial to a society that is already de-sensitized.

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Interesting challenge for the literati here....

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I read "Of Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace and I recommend it to others because it will "make you a better person.." Truly I believe that... and yet.. As a supporting argument for the case made here, my girlfriend has tried to read the same Steig Larsen "Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" novel 3 summers in a row.. but she can't manage it, she's too busy and tired being the compassionate and caring nurse that she is. I'm arguably a better conversationalist but it wouldn't take much of an assessment on anyone's part to decide that she's a better person.

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Literature make us better? I would have to say literature has made me vastly more uncertain about many things too many people take for granted. Take the question "does literature help us with morality?" Most people whether they answer yes or no already seem to presume to know morality before they even answer the question. And it seems most people who answer yes really act not much different than those who apparently believe nothing of morality is gained by literature. But literature has taught me that things like morality, thinking, being free are things which one never really arrives at but which one learns about and hopefully improves on all the time. I think I am morally better for reading literature but at the same time I am not certain really any of my decisions have been moral or whether I can think better or demonstrate greater freedom of action in life. I do not believe a person ever really arrives at morality any more than being able to think or be free. One simply learns as much as possible by all means to improve on such in life. Morality is not just about whether one kills another person, it can be as simple as planning a route to do errands to waste less gas in the automobile. Literature has without question taught me about a variety of actions and possible consequences of such, has suggested actions, broadened in every aspect my view of life. And made me uncertain whether I know anything of morality at all.

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It's more the literacy than the literature. Persistent left-to-right, top-tobottom scanning with the eyes of printed, two-dimensional abstract symbols to which significance has been assigned, which one subliminally interprets... likely does have psycho-sensory effects which probably condition perception to view and value some things and not even see other things. It's a powerful tool but it has unwanted side-effects. It's a kind of necessary evil in this sense. Can we use it without being addicted to it? Maybe keeping context(s) in mind as we scan the text will help. Or let's retrieve the trivium: literacy's instruction manual.

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Does gazing upon a sun-dappled babbling brook lower my blood pressure, improve my short term memory, and make me more effective at the office? Who cares? Just look, just see, just appreciate. The impulse to separate the object from its purpose, to wonder how the reward might be rewarding, is part of the Western mindset of perpetual wanting. Does art improve people? Nazis stole a lot of great paintings from the people they killed. Does switching off the acquisitive mode -what can Mr. Baudelaire do for me?- improve the soul? Yes. And what is the result of that poem, Le Chat? It causes tears of beauty.

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I don't look to great literature for such purposes. It makes me a better person in that it expands my mind, my vocabulary, and enhances my understanding of the world. That may translate in some way into making me more empathetic, but I think the framing of the question here is flawed. The author takes it as a given that this needs to be proved. I would only expect works claiming to be spiritual or moral guides to perform the function examined in the article. I certainly have no interest in any "evidence" about the functions of literature to want to read it, nor do I think we need any studies to continue expecting members of our society to participate in literature as well.

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Do we learn anything important about life from experience? Can we learn from the experiences of others? Can we experience events vicariously through literature? If the answer to these is 'yes' you may have an answer to your question. Furhermore, 'studies' that look at aggregate results that are 'measurable' suggest that virtue is quantifiable; this is simplistic in the extreme. Drone strikes may disturb us for many reasons but most ethicists would suggest an analysis should be situational and relative to context. No, humanistic education does not guarantee goodness and such didactic justifications are weak. But what kind of world would you rather live in? With or without Plato, Dostoyevski, Austen or Rimbaud?

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If this hypothesis about the beneficial influence of literature were true, college English departments would be the most tolerant, mutually supportive, and least quarrelsome groups on campus. Anyone who has spent much time on a campus knows that the opposite is generally true.

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As the great Oscar said, "All art is quite useless." Do I think I got certain kinds of moral and psychological insights from literature? Sure, but that's not why I read literature (and yes, I'm one of those people who has spent time with the good people of Middlemarch and Tolstoy, Proust, et al). I read because it's beautiful and I love beauty.

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I read literacy fiction because it gives me joy. This may not be concrete or verifiable, but it's the truth.

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You hit upon the right of it only at the very end. If you're reading great literature because you hope to realize some benefit, tangible or intangible, from it, you're doing it wrong. Great literature is not a means. It's an end.

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One could pose the same question but substitute "philosophy" for "great literature."

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I can think of at least a few instances where literature has a made some difference in my moral outlook. Reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being made me sincerely question, I think for the first time, the way that I treat animals. At the same time, I suppose it could be argued that the same thing could've happened if I'd watched a movie, or read an Animal Rights tract. I'm honestly not sure if the novel just happened to be the vehicle for the idea, or if something about the idea being in a piece of literature made it easier to understand and entertain. In Steven Pinker's Better Angels, he spends a chapter discussing the idea that the proliferation of books during the enlightenment helped lead to a drop in homicide (at least in Western Europe) during that period. Now of course, most of these printed works were probably not novels, but the points Pinker makes seem relevant to the discussion.

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The question is misguided. This is the kind of question the worldcontrollers among us like to ask so they can decide for the rest of us what our children will spend their time doing in world-controlled schools. Studying literature is a choice. Trying to turn that choice into some sort of duty seems repugnant to this reader. Reading great literature, which I happen to value highly, is not some duty that I do for my benefit. It may indeed beneficial but to read literature "for benefit" would be missing the point. The only reason I want my children to read great literature is because I want to share the joy and excitement and challenges I have found there. That should be enough. I don't need any arguments or studies. Maybe that's because I have no intentions of imposing my choices and values on my neighbors.

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Does what we enjoy- reading, or a sports event- ever change our character, values, habits,or behavior, in case we remember what we read last year, the last decade?

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Does eating good food make us better people? I imagine someone could make a case that it does - the attention to detail or something, how enjoying a carefully prepared meal trains us in a way of engaging with the world that is more responsive and ultimately "better" than the attitude cultivated by just wolfing down some industrial product But literature? Remember "The Man Who Loved Dickens"? I think we all know in the back of our minds that reading too much turns us into monsters, to some extent - we walk around thinking about Pierre and Natasha, or was it Kitty? No, Kitty was with Levin, wasn't she? Anyway, while we are walking around thinking about Marcel and Albertine, or that other one, real life is supposedly going on out there, somewhere - like Zorba kept trying to tell what's-his-name...

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If religion doesn't make us better people, then why should literature?

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Here's a simple take. It is difficult to argue that literature makes us worse, is it not? So let us safely say literature does not make us worse. Thus logically literature either leaves us unchanged or makes us better. I can think of a few examples of each.

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Of course literature doesn't make anyone a better person. Reading Jane Austen, for instance, has fixated millions of young women on getting rich husbands, to everyone's great moral detriment.

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Maybe it isn't just the reading that is the issue. There are also the steps of contemplation and discussion that can really open up literature, possibly moving it toward the category of 'life changing'. That's what I truly miss from my college days: reading, thinking, sharing and writing about Henry James, Joseph Conrad and so many others. Just the reading was pure pleasure but being in an environment that fostered understanding - that's what's missing from modern life for so many people. I think perhaps reading great literature can make you a better person: more tolerant, more curious, more empathetic, a more attentive listener, maybe even raising your expectations about how you treat other people and how they treat you. Years ago, even the science fiction was more literary. Too much of what passes for literature these days reads more like a film treatment. To judge by the comments on Amazon, readers have lowered their expectations considerably and authors seem perfectly happy to oblige them.

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I suppose a survey of English majors would answer the question - maybe the MMPI to find out how many psychopaths majored in litt in college - versus a survey of physical science majors. But then again, I'd like to believe that

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reading Shakespeare is not a dose of salts but simply a singularly wonderful aesthetic moment amidst the drab thing that is everyday life.

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In the introduction to his translation of The Iliad, Steven Mitchell told a story about traveling library in Colombia that left a copy of it in a small village. When the librarians returned, the villagers refused to return the book because they said it was their story in which insane gods came into their lives and destroyed them for no particular reason. That's it. Great literature is a therapeutic mirror.

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I am not so sure reading has anything to do with morality except that it has everything to do with language and thinking. Like learning a foreign language simply changes a person, and reading Dan Brown's "Inferno" is different from reading Dante' "Inferno". It establishes pathways of thought in the brain and opens up possibilities of thinking, and so maybe moral thinking, I don't know about that. But JK Rowling and James Lee Burke are easy and entertaining reads while Emmanuel Kant and Marcel Proust are not; they are difficult and not everybody finds them interesting or entertaining. . The pressing out and straining of the mind doesmake a differerence, however, and it is difficult to say how. You can't quite get any better than Harry, though. "I Love Magic!!!"

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Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted."

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There's Aristotle (2000 years), and then there's this (a careerist's 15 minutes). I think I'll stick with the long view.

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I wonder if Mr Currie is perhaps not a reader? I, and probably not you if you like to read, have never read Bleak House or To the Lighthouse or Little House on the Prairie with the wish to become morally more experienced. Rather it is the fascination and pleasure of experiencing another life, completely and persuasively, and recognizing in it, despite its otherness, one's own emotional experience. Not until my partner forsook literature for self help, swapping in The Man without Qualities for Mindfulness in Plain English did I begin to realize that the questions clunkily raised, laboriously addressed and partially answered in this new realm of writing are the very warp through which the weft of great literature is shuttled, leaving one with a beautiful and memorable insight. When a computer program can create original and revealing metaphor, Mr Currie may be able to get his clinical proof of the power of imagination to educate.

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=======================================
So what constitutes a piece of literature as *great*? This I do know: when we stopped reading books not only written by *dead, white men* but also those written by Latinos and Latinas, black women and men, LGBTQ, Asians, Native Americans, etc, etc, we all got just a little bit better... right?

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So much overanalysis! Reading great literary works doesn't make you smarter; it just makes you more interesting.

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If you're more interesting, it's probably because you are a little smarter.

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This article seems to jump to conclusion on insufficient evidence. I am from India and I can tell you the profound influence on individual and social behavior, conduct, morals, beliefs and motivations that the literature of the 2 great ancient Sanskrit and Vedantic epics The Vaalmeeki Raamaayana and the Mahaabhaarata has on the Indian people from all walks of life, especially in the rural heartlands of the vast country. Families even today judge themselves how closely they emulate the ideal of Raama or Krishna, the divine avataars. Even the politics of India today is influenced by the ideals of the utopian dream of "Raam-raajya"... the kingdom-of-Raamaa's-ideals-on-earth. These two epics have been handed down generations and have been embraced as the moral compass and benchmark of pan-India. Even today, you will find a copy of the epic storybook in every home. Even today you will see people tending to compare their own lives and their life-choices with those lifechoices and moral constructs described within the characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharata, Hanumaan,, Sugriva, Vibeeshana and others in the RaamaayaNa or Bheeshma, Vidura, Yudhishtara, Sikhandi in the Mahaabhaarata etc. There is ample street-level evidence in India even today of the extent of influence, moral and ethical, that their epic literature has on Indians, high and low.

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I have no idea whether great literature has a moral effect on readers. What I do know is that reading it (I am currently immersed in Proust) causes a tremendous amount of reflection - on ourselves, the times we inhabit, the kinds of friends we choose, our general outlooks. It is wonderful to have the time to enter into the worlds and ideas invoked by the greats... and it takes time to do it. For me, it is the time reading/reflecting that gives me such joy! Also, to enter these other worlds, especially when we can appreciate the minutia of everyday life in other times and places (Proust, Trollope, Henry James, and on and on and on), is finding my bliss!

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Aesthetic pleasure is enough; no need for self-improvement or morality. Great literature is an art form, nothing more and nothing less.

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In a comment below, someone identified at "jloaf" ends with this sentence: "But I know plenty of jerks and bullies who are highly cultured--and in fact use their deep knowledge of literature and the arts as weapons." This brings to mind a story -- perhaps apocryphal -- about Evelyn Waugh, the English novelist, who was a devout Christian as well as a great, nasty wit. It's said that he was at a dinner party talking to a friend when the loud comments of a man seated across the table began to irritate him. When he'd had enough, Waugh interrupted the man and in a few quick sentences eviscerated him to the point of public humiliation. Waugh's friend was appalled. "Was that necessary? You call yourself a Christian -- how can a true Christian allow himself to be so gratuitously cruel to a fellow, suffering human being?" Smiling at her, Waugh shook his head serenely. "My dear, you misunderstand. Try to imagine what I would have said to him had I NOT been a true Christian." Jloaf -- try to imagine what other weapons your highly cultured jerks and bullies might use if they lacked deep knowledge of literature and the arts. I'm serious. And by the way -- pointing to cultured Nazis as a proof that literature has no humanizing effects is beyond absurd. It's like pointing to an acutely psychotic deaf-mute with narcolepsy who has for some reason been given a year of cognitive talk-therapy, and claiming his lack of improvement proves that cognitive talk-therapy never works.

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This seems like an absurd set-up, as if literaturethe Greeks, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Victorians, the Russians, etc. were all one thing. I don't think you can argue that a good dose will make everyone more moral, but I do think that if you get exposed to enough of it, you'll find something that speaks to you. And if you never read anything challenging, it's a missed opportunity. I recall a young man I knew in a tutoring program who never did well in school He and his abused sister were being raised by their overburdened grandmother, and he was sort of written off as a student. One day we had a conversation and he told me with great excitement that his language arts class was reading "Of Mice and Men." He was so charged, describing the plot and the characters to me as if it was all something happening in his Harlem neighborhood. He took such pleasure in it, and while part of me shared his joy, another part of me was screaming that we and his school had failed him, that years of this sensitive young man's academic life had been wasted.I later heard

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he signed up for the army after 9/11, but I have no idea where he is now. But I do know that I never think of Steinbeck that I don't think of him.

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I'd have found this article more improving and worth my time if the writer had bothered to define, however loosely, "expertise." But putting that aside, I have found that literature, including War and Peace, gives me, first, an emotional experience that was complex, changing, and compounded of many elements, among which were the purely aesthetic experience of style, images, and intellectual stimulation ranging from what-next? to is-that-right? There can also be boredom, pleasure, intense concentration to be had while reading a novel; for example, the unbelievably boring (50 or 60 page) trai ride of Hans Castorp up the mountain to the sanatorium in Mann's The Magic Mountain, followed several hundred pages and many years later by the many pages of his dizzying trip down -- on skis; and, in between the two, some pretty amazing and substantive discussions of the malaise that pervaded bourgeois Europe in the decades before the First World War. The experience provided me by that novel became something for me to contemplate at leisure and at will. It made me an expert about nothing, but it deepened my understanding of the the lost world into which I had been born on the eve of the Second World War, it and certainly altered how I see not just the past but also the future (though hardly ever, if ever, the present, if there is such a thing). Only pretentious idiots think that literature makes them moral experts. It can, however, make one's life -- at least this one's -- better.

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I think art, whether it be opera, painting, or literature, can indeed have a powerful and permanent effect on the human character, usually for the better. What better way to teach about mob mentality then to see the opera, "Peter Grimes?" What better way to teach about racism then to read Faulkner's, "Sanctuary?" What better way to show the dangers of unbridled and charming cynicism then to read Oscar Wilde"s" "Picture of Dorian Gray?" The list goes on to eternity. If you are an open individual, literature can and will enlighten, broaden, and deepen any individual who is searching for a deeper truth.

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Does literature "make" us better? Morality an issue of technique, expertise? What is most important to us a matter of statistical probability? These are the wrong questions. Psychology can do better, and philosophy often does. The better question is: can literature be a way to help us be better? Absolutely. Literature explores possibility in such a way as to help us exercise moral judgment as one of many responses to the world? We won't certify this by statistical proofs. Literature fundamentally concerns possibility, and it proves itself by what it can do, by the understanding it makes available to us in the vicissitudes of our self-understanding. Literature, like morality itself, fundamentally concerns human agency. We don't choose the moral option very

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often--that's actually one thing literature actually shows us very well. Morality isn't justified by its frequency or its inevitability. It is grounded in love and, yes, faith, not in rationality or certainty. But if literature can keep moral possibility open to us, no matter now many times we miss it, it will still have a crucial role to play in our attempts to become better.

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I think it is really quite simple, literature enriches the inner mind.

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Hit "cntrl f", then type in the word "evidence". Professor Currie uses the word 29 times, and shows it about twice. In Texas we call that "Big hat, no cattle."

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Where do all our best ideas come from? Literature. Where do all our most noble and transcending ideas come from? Literature. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Christ, Saints Augustine, Francis, Dante, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Orwell, ......It is not mere sentiment. It is what we are, what we think. We wouldn't be people without our literature. What a silly, silly, didactic article.

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The philosophical author of the this opinion piece is tackling his survey type question as if it were one of cause and effect, suggestion and action. To begin with, the categories of "literature" and"what makes "better" person are each extremely vague and undefined. Better than what or who? Literature that is intentionally didactic or literature that is merely pleasureable? In terms of the intended reader, there is the individual degree of desire to be instructed, affected or aroused in whatever way according to the subject matter and the purpose(s) for which the author published the work to be considered. Finally, is it internal change or evidence of a resulting action that must be measured and how can a scientist measure long term or potential alteration in thought or behavior in a short term study? This question is not answerable as stated. The Op was written to challenge the NYTimes reader to dismantle or discredit the patently flawed argument or, at the very least, to respond, Of course those who agree with Prof. Currie' s equivocal conclusion had to invent another positive proof equally spurious. Time lost?? Not if you are enjoying the read.

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Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted.

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How can a university professor hold such an inadequate view of literature and it's effects on people? Why paint it with a broad brush? Just

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because literature doesn't make President Obama morally incapable of ordering drone strikes, it doesn't disqualify literature as a force for good that can produce good moral feelings for the majority of others. Literature has improved millions of lives and has greatly enhanced our culture & society for centuries. Imagine if great books of literature were banned and burned. Spend some time there Professor and you'll change your mind. Not sure you did the U. of Nottingham proud.

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If violent video games can corrupt, as some researches suggest, good literature surely can make you a better person, can't it? We are a product of our experience, and literature brings us experience, albeit indirectly, told by the author. Or, at least that is what John Ashbury said: How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk Have told you all and still the tale goes on In the form of memories deposited in irregular Clumps of crystals.

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Now one wonders whether the good professor's intellectual onanism is of any more value than literature.

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If anyone needs a demonstration of the ultimate vacuousness of Utilitarianism, I now have this column to present to him or her. For that I thank Prof. Gradgrind.

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It can make the author very rich! And that will do for me. Look at Stephen King who was hand to mouth until *Carrie* ran off into the millions. Or JK Rowling who was on the dole and is now up in ten digits. Or Tolkien whose "Fellowship" had a first press run of just 3500 copies because Allen and Unwin didn't think it would sell... Boy was that wrong. Rich! That's what matters! If Shakespeare were alive today he'd likely write Sci-Fi hits for Hollywood.

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Nobody could read Catch-22 and then sign up to go to war. Making them a better person.

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What is the value of philosophy? Clear thinking? Sophisticated prose? The best philosophers are also pretty adept at explaining things with an

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aesthetic and, dare I say, even literary flair that they picked up from reading literature. Literature is a touchstone, a common place. That may be changing, but it has served as such for a long time, and the narrative techniques of the masters are firmly rooted in the collective literary and philosophical unconcious of the most adroit thinkers. Here's a link to another NY Times piece on literature that gives some scientific evidence for the benefits of literature--"There is no frigate like a book!": Anny Murphy Paul states on March 17, 2012 that "The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto . . . [proposes] that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that 'runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.' Fiction with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other peoples thoughts and feelings."

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And yet another article from this very paper citing studies that explore the links between reading great literature and cognitive functioning and altruism: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0

Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know
By PATRICIA COHEN To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series Friends. (Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them. As Phoebe tells Rachel, They dont know that we know they know we know. This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking of mind reading is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

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Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say theyre convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literatures very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read? Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1990s. I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could ever learn, she said. At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift. Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said its a new moment of hope in an era when everyone is talking about the death of the humanities. To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing. The brain may be it. Getting to the root of peoples fasc ination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like mapping wonderland. Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories. Interest has bloomed during the last decade. Elaine Scarry, a professor of English at Harvard, has since 2000 hosted a seminar on cognitive theory and the arts. Over the years participants have explored, for example, how the visual cortex works in order to explain why Impressionist paintings give the appearance of shimmering. In a few weeks Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard, will give a talk about mental imagery and memory, both of which are invoked while reading. Ms. Zunshine said that in 1999 she and about 10 others won approval from the Modern Language Association to form a discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature. Last year their members numbered more than 1,200. Unlike Mr. Gottschall, however, Ms. Zunshine sees cognitive approaches as building on other literary theories rather than replacing them. Ms. Zunshine is particularly interested in what cognitive scientists call the theory of mind, which involves one persons ability to interpret another persons mental state and to pinpoint the source of a particular piece of information in order to assess its validity.

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Jane Austens novels are frequently constructed around mistaken interpretations. In Emma the eponymous heroine assumes Mr. Eltons attentions signal a romantic interest in her friend Harriet, though he is actually intent on marrying Emma. She similarly misinterprets the behavior of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightly, and misses the true objects of their affections. Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate is not too hard to foll ow. Add a fourth level, though, and its suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality. Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating, Ms. Zunshine suggested. Do I think he is attracted to her or me? Whatever the root cause, Ms. Zunshine argues, people find the interaction of three minds compelling. If I have some ideological agenda, she said, I would try to construct a narrative that involved a triangularization of minds, because that is something we find particularly satisfying. Ms. Zunshine is part of a research team composed of literary scholars and cognitive psychologists who are using snapshots of the brain at work to explore the mechanics of reading. The project, funded by the Teagle Foundation and hosted by the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, is aimed at improving college-level reading skills. We begin by assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts, said Michael Holquist, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale, who is leading the project. The team spent nearly a year figuring how one might test for complexity. What they came up with was mind reading or how well an individual is able to track multiple sources. The pilot study, which he hopes will start later this spring, will involve 12 subjects. Each will be put into the magnet an M.R.I. machine and given a set of texts of graduated complexity depending on the difficulty of source monitoring and well watch what happens in the brain, Mr. Holquist explained. At the other end of the country Blakey Vermeule, an associate professor of English at Stanford, is examining theory of mind from a different perspective. She starts from the assumption that evolution had a hand in our love of fiction, and then goes on to examine the narrative technique known as free indirect style, which mingles the characters voice with the narrators. Indirect style enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time. This style, which became the hallmark of the novel beginning in the 19th century with Jane Austen, evolved because it satisfies our intense interest in other peoples secret thoughts and motivations, Ms. Vermeule said.

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The road between the two cultures science and literature can go both ways. Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution, said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University. To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls altruistic punishers, people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage at cheate rs, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot. Its not that evolution gives us insight into fiction, Mr. Flesch said, but that fiction gives us insight into evolution. An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the university where Lisa Zunshine is a professor of English and misidentified the university where she was a graduate student. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 2, 2010 An article on Thursday about research into the way the brain processes literature misstated the name of the university where Lisa Zunshine, who is investigating the subject, is a professor of English. It is the University of Kentucky, not Kentucky University. The article also misidentified the school where Ms. Zunshine was a graduate student. It is the University of California, Santa Barbara not Stanford.

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Who cares? Great literature is great literature. The imputation that Tolstoy has the potential say to radicalize means nothing now, especially considering Islam . Read Hadji Murat!

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"I think fiction recues history from its confusions" - Don DeLillo

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Based solely on empirical data gleaned as a classical literature teacher for thirty years, I can say for certain that I am glad you were never in one of my lit classes - especially AP lit.

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Tolstoy's a good story teller that's why I like his books. There's not much written recently I finish. There's a Pultizer Prize winner by a school mate of mine that I put down after a few pages.

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I read fiction for fun.

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Great literature doesn't make us moral; it gives us a wider perspective about our lives. As a student and teacher of literature at the university level, I obviously have a dog in this fight, but my favorite professor at Kalamazoo College, Frank Waring, taught us that great literature tells us what it is to be a person at given time in a certain place. Even Daniel Kahnemans recent book Thinking Fast and Slow," makes the point that we are constantly creating narratives out of the chaotic and chance events of our lives. Reading helps us understand that we are not alone in our quest to create something meaningful in our lives.

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"Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" No. It simply prevents people from spending their weekends at the mall. :-)

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"Research" to find "direct causal evidence" that reading Aeschylus, George Eliot and Samuel Beckett makes you "better"? You know what? Never mind. Just up your dose of soma and call the firemen.

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So the esteemed "professor of philosophy" thinks there's no "evidence" that literature literature improves our "moral or social" sensibilities? Does he include philosophy in with "literature" and the humanities? If so, what exactly is the point of his profession or his career? Or are we in the postmodern realm of theater of the absurd and utter nihilism? Or is this a (pointless) demonstration of sophistry to prove that "philosophers are careful folk, trained in the ways of argument"? Surely the professor has read Plato who expressed UTTER DISDAIN for the sophists and their pointless, amoral tricks with language...

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I want some solid evidence that this column was worth reading. Based on my experience, it was waste of time.

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The Romantics and Victorians developed the value of "feeling" so that every common person, including women, children, and minorities could be considered VALUABLE and therefore people who deserved inalienable rights in addition to all the white, landholding, supposedly RATIONAL men who were given their rights in 1776 under the reign of Enlightenment thinking which valued reason above all else and could therefore break the divine right of kings. There were of course writers like Pope, Voltaire, and Johnson who gave birth to 18th Century Enlightenment. We don't have time here to discuss what the world would have been like if the great classical poets and writers had not survived, been translated, and helped Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare create

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the Renaissance. Imagine with me, the books that were, in fact, lost in the Library of Alexandria and how they would have changed the world if we had been able to save them. There is evidence to suggest scholars at the Alexandrian Library had calculated how to navigate around the world 1700 years before Columbus. Had enough yet? Every PhD in Literature must pass exams on how literature and society interacted over several hundred years. There is no doubt, or lack of evidence about this issue.

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The most that can be hoped for from people who read great literature is that they may be less boring for the experience. I suspect that I about to be contradicted by someone who sat through a boring lit 101 course. Well, it wasn't the books: lookin the mirror.

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Does literature teach us how to live? Of course it does!

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*** - Who is the reader of a cult writer? -A snob. A bighorn. Someone who does not want to account for how it is handled, -A sophisticated or obsessive strangeness Dan Brown is a writer of worship but it is a massive cult and, therefore, very little selective says Rodrigo Fresn Argentine writer, author of the novel The sky background. JD Salinger is also a writer of worship but theirs is about the most exquisite Zen Buddhism. Thus, Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami or David Foster Wallace would be high priests of sects expanding, while Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov will, always, totems against which his knees. Between them are all those intimate religions (prints of John Banville propose, Rick Moody, Iris Murdoch, Felisberto Hernandez, Denis Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Millhauser) by a few thousand are willing to whatever. That is, read on. And to recognize each other knowingly. We will never stop believing and pray to Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. A cult writer is one who makes reading so very similar to pray, with a meritorious difference: not only feel that we hear but also tells us nothing more than us. And of course, God exists and is called Shakespeare. As if it were a religious cult with several tectonic plates, all necessary to form, in the end, the church.

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Them's a lot of words to prove that words are unimportant

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Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 autobiographical slave narrative, writes of his developing literacy during his enslavement, and his first encounters with literature: "These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance." Literacy and literature freed Frederick Douglass.

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I don't know if reading serious literature makes one a better person, but it can make one a more interesting person to know and talk to. Recently I became a member of the Anthony Trollope Society on Facebook and have read, and sometimes participated in, a number of interesting discussions. Today there was a thread on how to define a "period drama," for example. In addition to opinions, there were citations to some scholarly articles. Granted, talking about the works of Anthony Trollope is a "niche" activity, but it's great for those who are interested. As for the effect of serious literature on people in general, let me quote that noted philosopher Pasquale, the Italian chef: "The more things you put into a dish, the more you'll find there when it's time to eat it." And there you have it.

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It's too bad Senator Proxmire is no longer with us. You'd be a sure winner for his Golden Fleece award. In the Medieval period, all literature was supposed to teach its readers what was right and what was sinful. Since Medieval readers-- a very small minority of the population-- were not all saints, having all literature expound morality was not a complete success. I much prefer philosopher of language Kenneth Burke's definition of literature as "equipment for living." It allows us to see how other people in contexts with which we ourselves are not familiar managed those contexts, with outcomes ranging from happy endings to tragedy. We learn from this. We borrow coping strategies from the characters and situations about which we have read. Literature presents us with an enormous resource of "equipment for living." Einstein had it right: not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts. I strongly suspect that you are still angry because at some point, you were forced to read a long novel that did not engage you at all. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I sincerely hope you will be ambushed by a long novel that does take you to a new world that you will delight in discovering.

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I was hoping someone would mention Kenneth Burke's essay. There's no one reason or way to read, but Burke's "proverbs writ large" seems central to

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me, even if it isn't understood or acknowledged. Reading won't make us more moral, but it provides experience without consequences, simulations as Keith Oatley calls them or imitations of actions in Aristotle's words. We can enjoy or be bored, heed or ignore.

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There are all kinds of ways for human beings to connect with each other, and reading a great book is one of my favorite. Through books, I can connect with the ideas and imaginations of people like me -- or not like me. Close in time and place -- or remote. I don't know if it makes me a more moral person, but I am pretty sure it makes me more intelligent. Apparently some people think we need to justify the inclusion of literature in the curriculum through empirical evidence of its moral benefits on the reader. I agree with the author that it may be morality-neutral. But we know it's not pleasure-neutral and surely we can agree that the exchange of ideas and art through the body of great literature built up over the centuries of human civilization is, in and of itself, a public good?

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After reading through these posts, there seems to be some repeated claims. 1) The attempt to judge literature by scientific measures will always fall short or inconclusive because the arts are inherently different than science 2) To set parameters like "great literature" and "morality" is difficult because those are loaded terms (isn't literature also philosophy, history, nonfiction?) 3) There is something about our current society that still makes us ask, "so what's the purpose" of reading, of art, etc? (similar questions people asked in the past). I find this article and readers' posts fascinating. They are important questions to ask. I do believe there is a two-way street with literature. It both helps to create the society around it, and it mirrors society. So if nothing else, literature can give us a mirror to view our past or present, and possibly give us a glimpse into the future. Can tv do this? Sure. Can hanging out with friends? Yes. But when a writer uses language and imagination, there are avenues of circuits uses (unconscious and conscious) that are uniquely illustrative of our current language and culture. Certainly a piece of fiction is different than a commercial (though they use imagination and language too, and reflect/create society). It begs the question, why teach shakespeare in college and not family guy? Isn't the presentation of race just as "complex" in family guy as othello? Sure. Works deemed "great" too also have "power" behind/upholding them.

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Does reading great literature make us more moral, necessarily wiser, more empathetic? Of course not! If it did, the members of English departments would be would be moral exemplars operating in rational discourse instead of the scum of the campus. After a thirty-five year career as a faculty member teaching literature, I can swear that I found better human qualities working in a packing house than among my colleagues.

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But so what? Does studying music or painting or dance, or watching and analyzing NFL football make us "better" ? I see no evidence of that, either. Does that warrant expunging such activities from our lives? I do not. Just as refining competence at tennis enriches the tennis player's experience of life, so has adding to my sophistication in reading enhanced the quality of my mind and given it greater range. Has it made me happier? Depends on how one would define "happy." It certainly hasn't made it easier to see a movie with friends who delight in shoddy trickery, but then my palate doesn't allow me to savor the fare served at McDonald's. The essayist s imply does not engage the right argument, and to fence with Martha Nussbaum is a bit like besting Marv Throneberry on the baseball diamond.

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Obviously some academics don't get out much. Without the desire to read, study, and learn, there would be no universities to give this man a job.

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Puh-LEEZ: Read Sidney's "Defense of Poetry" on fiction v. philosophy and history. I rest my case.

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Most good literature is depressing. I think good humor is more important. Rodney Dangerfield's books make me laugh and feel good. Dickens curdles my stomach.

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Read ANNA KARENINA and meditate on Part 8. If you then think that literature does not influence life in profoundly positive ways, don't read anything any more.

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Of course we do best: Multiply our experience, develops the function more precious and less frequent of our intelligence: The imagination. We are who "created" the gaps of each character, each place, each suspect, each emotion. .. But mostly, it sensitizes us, in a world in which this virtue is understand many times as a weakness, a flaw, a feature rare, questionable, doubtful vein (sexual identity, marginality, Mental insanity, etc.. Obviously we no longer will impact or be guiding our moral values and convictions as in ours achieved a Victor Hugo. Life is a slight, a very brief and fleeting breath, so ephemeral and foolish that we, in possession of a brain hungry for knowledge, need to experience, thousands of interests, so, music, art, travel and adventure, open skies and wide horizons, challenges, achievements, friends, etc., if a brain inside in an aging body so, so quickly, that reading-more than the audio-visual media in which

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the imagination wells up multiply.Multiply less geometrically the "forward" and demanding our small gray cells. Let's Live a more breath! Marco Antonio Rios Pita Giurfa

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The writer of the column is literate but innumerate. He poses the question in terms of facile cause-and-effect. That is, if you read literature then you'll be a better person. We should look at the thesis instead in terms of probability. That is, if you have read a great book, there is a higher probability that you will be edified and improved. Also, there is a higher probability that society will be ameliorated. For those who don't read or don't take a book's theme to heart may apprehend it through secondary or tertiary sources, or by observing the behavior of others who did get it. What this guy is saying is that Charles Dickens had no effect on the blight caused by the Industrial Revolution. Or that John Steinbeck had no effect on the perception of the workers of America during the Depression. God bless Tiny Tim, and heaven help Ma Joad.

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Great literature from James to Tolstoy to Fitzgerald will shake us out of our certainties. That in itself is a positive in any life where certainties often lead to our disasters. And literature as pure entertainment such as P.G. Wodehouse provides a pleasure that comes from laughing at the foibles of humanity, and adding to our small store of joys - yes, joy can improve character. I assert that I was a better man after reading "Uncle Fred in the Springtime,' and "Joy in the Morning" than before. The use of precise, revealing language by a great writer improves our lives in ways we may not see as we read - but that language demands clarity in thinking, and that can lead to a better life. No, the Mona Lise doesn't turn us into philosopher kings, nor does "Remembrance of Things Past," but great art in any form shakes us from the comfortable rigidity of our lives and opens us up to a wider, better life,

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Busy humans always communicating to survive, claiming things are the right way to be done, tracking all our every past and present moves at all times. We have, without a doubt, survived as a race for so long because of our storytelling and the maps it creates... drawn or imagined, maps for all different things we encounter in life. Spoken, written, danced, typed and acted. Reading may enlighten some people, but other forms of communication can enlighten just as well for others. We are storytellers... end of story.

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I teach 9th grade English in L.A., and boy is this article all wet. To sell my kids on reading (and they need selling--many have never completed a book before) I explain that reading is like lifting weights for the brain: lifting weights

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doesn't just make you a better weightlifter, it makes you stronger, faster, more athletic, attractive, healthier, etc. Likewise, reading literature makes us more interesting, more persuasive, funnier, cooler, more attractive, smarter, more compassionate, etc. Nike's campaign works the best to promote reading. Just do it.

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What is great is a matter of taste. Does reading challenging literary content (what is challenging is subjective also, but I ask anyway) make us better (at)...? Better writers? I'm asking. I'm asking because I see around me people writing words down in shortened versions of unpunctuated kinds of sentences in largely a reactive fever (as though under a trance, sure of self, shoot from the hip) and this hasn't in my opinion made us better but there's nothing challenging on the quick. Does reading challenging literary content build vocabulary and does a robust vocabulary make us better? I believe it makes us better speakers but morally it would make us tricky, careful, selective...liars. Except here I assume (I am generalizing because I do assume), on the whole, the English language isn't used near at all close to its vastness. And the language is used terribly in speech and often terribly on the quick. Is this a sign people are not reading challenging literary content? yes. yes, it is. Does this make us morally wrong or does our shortened illiterate speech reveal more truth?

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Does literature make us better? Going from the American political scene apparently not only is it absurd to speak of literature increasing morality, apparently nothing really can be taught and we are supposed to defer rather to youth than age. The American conservative party (Republican) is widely vilified in America today. The party has been repeatedly stated as having as its backbone white men over the age of forty. Apparently no amount of age and experience increases morality in American life. Rather it is helpful to be young and relatively inexperienced to have morality--read in today's NY TIMES right next to this Stone article that people under age 30 largely dismiss the GOP. Either young people automatically "know" morality better than older people or they are being taught morality by the relatively few older people that somehow "learned" morality and became Democratic and escaped being drawn into the clutches of the pernicious GOP. Certainly in American life the emphasis is on believing "old dogs cannot learn new tricks" and that young people have the intellectual and moral advantage and can learn new tricks, although it is not clearly stated exactly where the "new tricks" are coming from... Interestingly, it is the Democratic party that speaks constantly about "more education" despite depending on not only young and relatively

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inexperienced people, but people willing to view people of greater age as automatically suspect...Interesting situation.

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Neither the article nor the comments address the ideas in literature that inspire the feelings of readers, and limit what it means to be a good person to being kind and generous. What about the good citizen? Uncle Tom's Cabin used the power of sentiment to humanize slaves for readers, and helped change history. Governments censor literature and writers take risks to write about difficult topics because literature has the power to change people and societies.

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What a GREAT article. I have so enjoyed reading the responses. Columns such as this stimulate great discussion. What wonderful, thoughtful readers interatct with the Times!

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Okay, art in general can add so much value to our lives in so many ways. But when you talk about "great literature" (meaning a certain canon of literature dominated by straight, white men) and "civilizing effects" (meaning pressuring people to think and act in a way that is considered "civilized" by straight, white men), you run into a lot of trouble. And you cause a lot of pain to people who don't see the world in a normative way. Before we can talk about literature making us better, we need to be clear how we've defined our terms. Whose literature? What is "better?" And then, is that always a goal worth pursuing?

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I've always thought there was something positive to be said for being broadly traveled. Great novels take you places you've never been and probably will never visit. In that sense, they contribute to your being broadly traveled.

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There is a lot of wisdom about human nature in most great literature. It is to a certain extent wasted on the young who haven't learned life's lessons yet. I don't know why I read, but I enjoy it and every once in a while I find something of enormous resonance with my own life. Other than that, it's a good pastime.

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Are you therefore suggesting literature lacks aesthetical pleasure, recognizable between society and culture in which one lives?

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London, 1802 (William Wordsworth) Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour; England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

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Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. -----You are echoing Wordworth, I presume? I first read Prelude in freshman English, but went back to it 50 years later and now against all odds WW is my favorite poet, aside from Plath. He should be the poet laureate of global warming. Not sure greatness of language is found in novels. English literature is really the poets.

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I think the essayist is confusing propaganda with literature. Literature, as far as I'm concerned, wants little to do with morality. For a little while it's an impossible thing, until it's finally conscripted into our discourses and becomes propaganda. One you can measure, the other is too diffuse to get a handle on. Great literature undoubtedly concerns itself with fundamental moral questions and till the twentieth century, and even there, most great literature ultimately posed as a moral critique of the world as it exists. Can you think of any works of literature, that is immoral? De Sade perhaps, but is he a great author? I would love to know of great literary works described as immoral, and whether that perception of immorality stood the test of time? Lady Chatterley's Lover for example is no longer immoral, is it? Does an immoral protagonist in any case, make the work itself immoral?

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Many a Nazi was well read. Many a saint illiterate. What makes good people good and bad people bad is a complicated affair that doubtless predates the written word.

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Please look into the work of Elaine Scarry, who writes about narrative form, neurology, and considerations of beauty, fairness, and ethics. Her books changed my appreciation of literature for life.

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This search for a quantifiable outcome from reading literature is every bit as silly as the view that the purpose of college is to make more money. Both literature and higher education (of which literature should be a central element)

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are valuable because they make life worth living. That is a value judgment. No amount of scientific research will ever successfully persuade someone to adopt

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Whatever its moral effects, great literature is just chewier. There's more in it to contemplate, more to be stimulated by -- it sets off more neurons maybe (which I suppose is what's meant by "aesthetic reward"). If literature does have a moral effect, it likely comes from its ability to put the reader into other people's heads. Fiction gets its appeal largely from explaining how people work (which is a puzzle) and, presumably, this leads to understanding, and so, if the reader's capable, to empathy.

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Reading trash literature, or literary classics, produces a state of mind that will never last, whether the reader is an Inspector Javert or a Jean Valjean. The state of mind, or mood, produced, may be the same, but the points of view are different. Our mood passes, our points of view stay the same. We often forget how written stories evolved from dramatic enactments and pictographs with religious or mystical power to create a virtual reality, as a disco song puts it, to make us "feel real," to enjoy a charmed life or a taboo, even dangerous, experience. For that reason, Jean-Paul Sartre despaired that literature reflects but does not change our existence.

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What if I LIKED reading Anna Karenina? It's one of my favorite books! I read it on my own as a young teenager, outside of my school curriculum. I don't feel "morally enlightened" for having read that or any of the many, many "challenging works of literary fiction" I have taken in -- and loved or hated -over a lifetime. Reading is just something I do. I read all of Dostoyevsky's stuff for pleasure, too. It didn't make me better, just maybe a little odd. The only works of literature-with-a-capital-L that I consider "hard won" are those I disliked. But if you don't read widely, and you don't cover the works generally accepted as "important," how can you know how to tell bad writing from good? How can you develop your own taste in writing, if you don't read the classics?

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One can learn more about psychology from literature than from psychologists. Henry James is more interesting than, say, William James.

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I put it to you that this is the most useless, wrongheaded piece yet to appear in "The Stone" series. Beauty and its complexity: those are the reasons for reading Proust or Tolstoy. "Betterment" we leave to the sociologists, one of which I presume Professor Currie always wanted to be..

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I believe this was pretty much Nabokov's view - that it was all about aesthetics, not about improvement, moral or otherwise. If one would like to read an "improving" novel, then try "atlas shrugged" not AK (in which a number of cardboard figures are moved about in various instructive ways.)

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1. It's a lot easier to see the log in someone else's eye, as it were, in a good story than it is to see the log in your own. 2. You're assuming all literature is in novel form. Not so. Movies and TV series have taken over the role of story telling. It doesn't matter how we get it, we need stories to define who we are. Every culture since the beginning of time has had story tellers who are revered for that skill. Bible/Middle March/Games of Thrones=same thing. 3. It sounds like you have trouble reading long books, which is understandable because you have trouble writing long essays--you started out strong and got kind of boring there at the end.

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Research will probably never answer the question. But isn't it enough to know that enjoying and appreciating any human achievement that is not also destructive is good for us?

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Poetry and novels have made me think the way I do. They are the greatest supporters of my personal freedom. I don't need a gun to protect my freedom, but don't touch my books. A great work that has stood for many generations is an example of pure human integrity that is tough (not impossible) to find in the real world or in the sciences.

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Yeah, you know what else is "unproven" by science? That the ancient Greek deities don't exist in reality.

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What more evidence does a person need that literature has enlightened him and sharpened his moral expertise than his self? If for no other reason than simply to say READ, then you are part of a whole people who have been trying to say the same for generations. I write this comment under the influence literature has had on me. I assume you wrote your article under the same. To paraphrase Mortimer J. Adler, I have no doubt that literature has raised me from a level of ignorance to a level of understanding. My question is Why would not anyone take stock in not only these words, but the words of many from all the centuries that reading (knowledge) is power?

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I have just a simple point to make: Years ago, early in my university teaching career -- literature, as it happens -- I came across a very appropriate quote: Poetry may not save your soul, but it just could make your soul worth saving.

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Reading Middlemarch has never been a chore, not even when I was nineteen. I found it 'easy' but then finding an author one enjoys is like meeting a new friend. Some people one likes, others not so much. Has reading great works made me morally superior? Has grappling with the supposed complexity of some works somehow made me a better person? No to both. Books have been my life, they have accompanied me, made me think, entertained and stimulated me. Have they somehow been 'good for me?'. I don't know, but I think not. All I do know is that engaging with another mind in a work of fiction has enriched my life and imagination beyond measure. That is enough 'good' for me.

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Literature is like the Force in Star Wars: it can be used for good as well as evil, so to speak. You're asking the wrong questions here.

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This article is exceedingly tedious. I've never heard suggested (before this article) that the great reason to read classic works of fiction is to become "more morally enlightened" unless of course you're reading the Bible and some of us already know what hogwash that assertion is! I have heard said and more or less agree that besides the pure pleasure of reading a great book you can improve your critical thinking skills. Why not talk about that?

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I don't think literature makes one a better person, and I actually don't know many people that do perhaps professors of philosophy do. I do think it makes one smarter, just like doing math problems does. Literature exercises the brain, and in a different way than doing math does. I can't prove that, but it is rationally plausible, unlike faith in religion.

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"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book." -- Vladimir Nabokov

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I think it was Gaston Bachelard who said great literature will change you as a person. I, personally, believe a better person. But then how does one define 'better.

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I recently read "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu all seven volumes. In my overweening ambition I am now giving it a try 'en francais'. I view James Joyce in much the same fashion as I do Proust: both authors expand one's consciousness. For me that's it.

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This is a fascinating question, and I'm glad that it's getting consideration in the Times. But you're asking one question here and answering another. You ask "Does reading (generally) make us better people?" and then answer "Does reading create more empathy by acquainting us with situations we haven't experienced?" Of course, reading (generally) does make us better people even if it's only to give us a language to talk about things we hadn't known about before. But literature itself has been working on the latter question for hundreds of years. I understand this is a philosophy column, but I immediately don't expect to hear very new and interesting things from someone who is talking about a field outside of his own. Martha Nussbaum's "Love's Knowledge" is hardly the exemplar of this particular inquiry, considering that it's out of date, is more about Nussbaum's frustrations with the limits of her own field, and a discussion of how much she loves books rather than their ethical merits. It's hardly an example of a rigorous literary study. It might be influential, but it's cited more often as something to argue against rather than as support for a new argument. Other ethical criticism (Booth, George Levine, Altieri, Hale, J. Hillis Miller, etc.) would be much better places to start. Better to think about literature on its own terms (rather than psychology's), especially when you're asking a question that novels themselves still haven't worked out.

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Dear RS, My assertion that I have grown from this experience does not put me in competition with anyone else than my own former self. And my personal awareness of this is in fact evidence of its occurrence not hearsay, not unfounded allegation. Since these Comments are all anonymous, there is no "display".

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After reading a few of these comments, which seem far more thoughtful than article itself, I was reminded of one of Richard Feynman's gems. It goes something like this. "Physics is like sex. It may have some practical value, but that's not why we do it." I think this applies to reading good literature as well.

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In my experience, great literature is able to tease nuance out of everyday stories. I never really thought of it as a medium for "moral education," rather it hones our ability to see real-world situations in a nuanced light, and engage real-world situations with critical thought. And our current public discourse could certainly use a heavy dose of nuance.

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The case that reading great literature earns you a moral dividend sounds like a Ponzi scheme: you can be morally wealthy, but only if you persuade others to follow you and read the same books. We should ask instead what is it that draws our species to stories in the first place. Oral storytelling existed for thousands of years before the first story found its way on to paper. We have a penchant for plot, narrative, characters, and meaning. Studies show we are hardwired to learn through stories. It was how our ancestors passed on knowledge to the next generation. "Did I ever tell you about the time the village over the river attacked us in the middle of the night?" What does this teach you in an instant? Don't trust the people across the water and remain vigilant always. Life saving lessons that are hard to forget. It seems that rather than provide lessons in morality, literature provide lessons in survival. As our societies became more complex, so did our stories. Countless sub-disciplines of "survival" sprung forth: social, intellectual, personal, financial, spiritual, and so on. In essence, literature is a library of possible consequences of decision-making or, simply, living life; the ultimate game theory armamentarium. We glean from stories what we can, subconsciously equipping ourselves to make better choices. Morals are but one lesson in a panoply. In other words, great works of literature are lessons in life, with all the moral ambiguity that comes with it.

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It is completely beside the point whether there is research confirming or dis-confirming the effect of reading (great) literature on morality. We already know that readers and non-readers alike have been and will be morally diverse. Morality/civilization are not products of one activity. Auschwitz was opened and closed after Dante. We also know that we tend to read fiction not because we hope that it will make us morally better but because we like doing it. The so-called intellectual elite that apparently insists on the former is clearly misguided. Telling this elite that it cannot pontificate about the moral value of reading without bothering to check their facts is pointless. Will their pontificating be more bearable if there is a list of psychological studies supporting it? No. Will their forcing Tolstoy on themselves or others be more justified? No. Will they stop pontificating once they are told that their premise is scientifically baseless? No.

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I make no claim that reading classic literature or difficult books will make me a more moral person. It has, though, over time made me a more subtle reader. I enjoy the challenge of understanding Proust's serpentine sentences, for instance. It's an ego boost, and therefore, a cultural boost. I read Proust therefore I think I'm better. But is that any more true than being morally better?

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Perhaps, but only to a select, and diminishing segment of the population that still reads classic literature, and ranks you by who you've read.

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Professor Currie disqualifies the notion he starts from -- that literature can "expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities" -even though he concedes that there is widespread agreement on this point -because the current *arguments* for it may be circular. So -- (???) -- he demands that psychological testing (mostly done on college undergraduates) demonstrate that literature makes us more *moral.* How does he get from A to C? Flawed arguments don't disqualify nearly universal intuitions (if we widen the focus from narrative fiction), and they don't demand that we fire the remaining philosophers and hire more academic psychologists. (I'm a *former* lit professor who got into the study of lit because I *loved* it -- jury is still out on how bad a misreading of the profession that was -- so I have no dog in this fight (Does delight make us more moral? Who can tell?)

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Currie's premise that the only way literature makes us "better" is to make us more moral (by whatever objective analysis is eventually accepted in this regard) is interesting to ponder but profoundly simplistic. There are other more concrete and even quantifiable - ways that literature refines and improves us.

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In addition, many of the critics of earlier experts that you mention (i.e., the ones showing that expertise is "bogus") are playing the easy game of sitting at a later time and judging anyone who didn't predict the way that things actually turned out to have been foolishly wrong. On obvious criticism of this is that it mixes together things that should be distinguished: it is perfectly fair to judge stock-traders or policy experts on their ability to make money and prevent disaster. But that is a far different matter than judging earlier philosophers, authors, visionaries, and so forth. Second, this reveals the most basic violation of proper historical method, because there isn't the slightest attempt to understand what experts in earlier time could and could not have known, or how remarkable it was that some people could form a powerful conception of what might come to pass, given the blindness about the future that envelopes every era. For example, one can easily laugh at Newton for believing that there was a universal ether, that the sun was the center of the universe, and so forth, if one ignores the obvious fact that he got a stupendous amount right, laying the basis for modern physics, and he created the most important revolution in scientific knowledge for several hundred years.

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When Nussbaum argues that "the narrative form gives literary fiction a peculiar power to generate moral insight" and "make vivid the details of a

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moral issue," I scarcely think that she is claiming that those who master Henry James are "moral experts", subject to your claim that "much of what we take for expertise in complex and unpredictable domains is bogus." Having deeper moral insight does not translate into always making "superior" choices, because for most moral problems there is no one correct answer, no moral calculus guaranteeing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. If in a police state, you decide to let your brother die in order to protect the lives of dozens of oppressed people, this does not mean that your choice automatically gets a gold star. Read, for example, the passage in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that concerns Antigone. Creon as king is both justified and required to uphold the law for all citizens and would be at fault if he allowed his relative to break the law, whereas Antigone is justified and indeed required to follow the traditional familial laws and bury her dead brother, even though he attacked the city. Do you imagine that there is any unambiguously correct solution to this problem? Having a broad knowledge of culture at least allows one to understand that difficulty of such moral dilemmas, and it gives us a common language with which to discuss them.

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In addition, many of the critics of earlier experts that you mention (i.e., the ones showing that expertise is "bogus") are playing the easy game of sitting at a later time and judging anyone who didn't predict the way that things actually turned out to have been foolishly wrong. On obvious criticism of this is that it mixes together things that should be distinguished: it is perfectly fair to judge stock-traders or policy experts on their ability to make money and prevent disaster. But that is a far different matter than judging earlier philosophers, authors, visionaries, and so forth. Second, this reveals the most basic violation of proper historical method, because there isn't the slightest attempt to understand what experts in earlier time could and could not have known, or how remarkable it was that some people could form a powerful conception of what might come to pass, given the blindness about the future that envelopes every era. For example, one can easily laugh at Newton for believing that there was a universal ether, that the sun was the center of the universe, and so forth, if one ignores the obvious fact that he got a stupendous amount right, laying the basis for modern physics, and he created the most important revolution in scientific knowledge for several hundred years.

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You also ignore the possibility that a vision of or warning about the future might influence what actually came to pass, helping to prevent the worst potentials. The latter case is particularly clear in cases such as environmental warnings or dystopian writings about nuclear war. Many of these dark prophecies of earlier decades appear overwrought now precisely because our society took action in response to them and prevented the worst potentials from taking place.

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The source of the word moral lies in a Latin word for goodness. To have a moral perspective does not imply a binary or oppositional approach. A child grows from a simple sense of goodness to an adult's senses of the complexity of goodness. The question about literature's role in the process extends to other experiences and persons in the life of the individual. Aside from the aesthetic merits of literature as an art, it allows a person to see experiences and people from multiple points of view in the contexts of changing circumstances, different periods of time, and various settings. Literature as well as the other arts allows a person to live life more fully, to come closer to understanding the human condition, and to increase knowledge of oneself. How do we prove these complex benefits that literature offers? An objective examination will not do the trick, but conversing with readers of literature might begin to give us an idea of their appreciation or knowledge of goodness. Another step might be listening to people who have made contributions to society discuss the issues and problems they have faced and the processes of resolving them. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn, "John Keats wrote, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Too bad he isn't about to continue the conversation.

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Actually, "Moralis" in the sense of applying to manners was coined by Cicero to translate the Greek ethikos, the source of the word ethics. It ultimately means custom or manner, like in the phrase mos maiorum, or way of the ancestors. Now, the Romans certainly had a default impulse to call anything that resembled or followed the way of the ancestors good, but the phrase didn't itself mean good, like bonus. Of course, literature could serve what we would call acculturation needs, as you seem to argue. However, venerable Plato famously argued that most literature and poetry should be suppressed in the ideal state, since people would be likely to emulate the negative aspects of even the Iliad or Odyssey. Just as venerable Aristotle argued for catharsis, that the expression of powerful emotions would benefit the people and prevent them from expressing these emotions through murder and mahem in reality. Turns out that the ancients don't seem to have reached any firm conclusion on the issue either.

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I think when "the canon" was written, literary fiction was one of the very few - if not only - ways in which common people were exposed to other cultures and other ways of life. So the cumulative effect of reading literary fiction back in those days would be for people to think: "Hm, mine is not the only way of life. Therefore mine not be the only opinions that count. Therefore

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maybe I'm not right about everything all the time after all." Or some version of that. Is this the rise of morality in a person? Maybe.

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I don't know of anyone who actively prescribes a dose of Proust or James to someone they know who's done something that's morally repugnant. I have to admit that I find this entire line of reasoning rather silly, since few authors became writers because it was their overarching desire that Les Miserables or The Red and The Black would morally educate people. Certainly, a few authors have suggested that their work was meant to uncover great wrongdoings or the mechanics behind great evil, (Harper Lee and Truman Capote come to mind) but much of the literature that has overtly sought to "better" people (Horatio Alger's books, say) is second-rate. I think that the raison d'etre of literature is that it can illustrate for us the many moral, ethical and intellectual quandaries that human life inevitably bestows on us. Generally in the best literature, the solutions are elusive. Whether we act on the knowledge we thus presumably acquire is entirely another matter. And I think it hardly matters that simpler, more prescriptive instructions ("Buy War Bonds!" "Take a Bite Outta Crime!") may be more effective. Obviously, a steady diet of bad, monotonous information is just not, well, "good" for one.

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Some of us do know, Professor Currie, that literature enlightens. Reading literature invites the reader to think about complex situations with some care. Literature poses questions that readers greet intimately as they explore their own characters. Without questions, there is no learning, only being and doing.

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This topic touches on a matter that concerned me through high school and college. I wanted to know, deeply, why a given piece of literature was not just recommended but part of the course of study. I wanted a teacher or professor to sum up, as an introduction to understanding of the greatness of a given work, why we were reading it. I wanted them open a door, a pathway. I grew up without many books in the house wanting to be a writer from about age ten or eleven onward. Overtime, I learned, of course, that there were great works and lesser ones, but I needed a guide to help me along. Instead, I just dove headlong into what seemed to make sense to me and called it my own. Beckett and the "French absurdists" spoke to me, as did the hometown hero, Updike, and many others. We can easily say that someone who has never read any great literature is a lesser person than those who have, but that doesn't answer the cause and effect question, does it? The world is erratic, chaotic, disjointed, discontinuous, nonlinear, brutal, often ugly. Writers put it together and help us to make sense of it; what's more, they portray a world the opposite from most the above adjectives. As we take their view into mind and heart, we pull out little pieces of understanding,

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impressions, that become a part of our beings. They help us to see life and to see it as an ongoing, somewhat rational process. Great literature redefines the general or popular understanding of the world and human experience.

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There may be a lot of evidence. For example, the people most devoted to literature, especially fiction and poetry, are much more often found occupying peaceful positions at universities than on the streets mugging people in order to buy drugs. Former convicts and other hard cases often cite a work of literature as seminal in turning their lives around. Visit a library - do you encounter street gangs and hitmen borrowing books? Nay - you encounter parents with children, and other reasonably well-behaved individuals. I make these observations with tongue loosely planted in cheek, but also to make the point that the evidence is so pervasive as to be hard to isolate. I myself will spend no further time worrying about this question. Instead, I will return to reading my novel of the moment.

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Very interesting article and comments! As one who has spent his life in the arts (but is also a firm believer in science), I find the issue a conundrum: I believe firmly (from personal experience) that exposure to great art of all genres changes me (and many others of my acquaintance) for the better. Whether it is possible to draw a direct and provable connection between exposure to are and improved morality is deeply complex; however, I'd venture to say that those who have read "War and Peace" would be pretty much unanimous in agreeing that it is of greater value than pulp fiction. But each of us takes different things from our exposure to art (and to all the other experiences in our lives). My guess is that most people grow in positive ways as human beings from connecting to art, but there certainly will be exceptions. Still, would I recommend that high-school English classes read Tolstoy? You bet I would!

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I don't know what defines great literature. What may be great to me may be pulp to another person. I believe that it is important that a person reads, be it fiction or non fiction. My late dad, when we were stationed in France in the late 1950s, would drive us to the post library on a regular basis. A whole new world was opened to me and I was only 7. We didn't have a TV and the Armed Forces Network went to low power in the evening so we would read after we did our homework. To this day, I'm 61, I would rather read then do almost anything else. I would like to think my love of reading has made me a better person. I despair when my friends say they don't have time to read but can find time to go a movie or can't find the time to read with their children. I have often wondered how much better our public schools would be if we dedicated just half the time to reading that we dedicate to the "STEM" subjects.

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1. Readers of literature can attest to the effects that certain works or bodies of work have had on them - beyond picking up medical knowledge or the names of flowers. Margaret Atwood made me into something like a feminist (I'm male but a believer). These reports may not be totally reliable but they are highly suggestive, and in my mind prove at least that literature CAN have moral impact - if not that it always does. 2. Transpose your argument into a different situation, and aim your attacks at literature in schools. Doesn't that make a few things clearer? In K-12, there is no philosophy class. The only arena in which children debate moral issues in school is in their literature classes, and in the modern era, few are willing to preach a list of simple, moral "rules of thumb" in the first place, even if those would be effective as your opinion suggests. Since English class is what we've got, perhaps we should focus not on the demonstrability of literature's moral efficacy, but rather on how we can make more of the morality of narratives in the classroom.

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When I think of works of fiction that influenced me, I think most of a novel by Sinclair Lewis, "Arrowsmith", which is seldom read any more. It made a strong impression on me (I read it as a teenager, certainly before I went to college) and although I did not at first choose a career in medicine, that is ultimately where I ended up. Speaking only for myself and my own journey, I think that reading "Arrowsmith" helped me become what I am today, and that it would likely not have happened save for the fact that I read that novel. Medicine has been a meaningful and useful career, and I treasure it. And daily, like Martin Arrowsmith, I hope to savor my successes, and appreciate also my failures, which enlighten me more than anything else. Jim Rosenthal, M.D. Annapolis, Maryland

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Hi It;s so ironic you mentioned Arrowsmith..I just read it a few months ago after I read Dodsworth...I used to read Sinclair Lewis as a young girl, but no one reads him anymore it seems. I hadn't read Arrowsmith so I was quite impressed with it. I gave my copy of a used book to my surgeon as he had asked for it. .

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Charles Rosen wrote (I hope I get his words right), "Almost all art is subversive--it attacks existing values and replaces them with those of its own creation." A possibility to consider: great literature presents us with new values that, over time, become part of our modern and potentially more correct and compassionate ethical system. If that were true, then literature of the past can have moral importance apart from our reading it today.

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Currie presents an interesting challenge to those who (like myself) think that engaging with literature may improve us. But his challenge is unfair: Currie would have us doubt the validity of our belief only because it hasn't been rigorously scientifically tested. How does one design a controlled study that would test literature's moral impact when the variables are so numerous? One glaring and critically important variable is the literature itself. The book that "changed my life" was Brothers Karamazov. Before reading it, I was a proud nerd and teetotaler who hated jocks, the popular crowd, and those who drank alcohol underage. Then I read Brothers K, and found the saintly character of Alyosha, who was steadfast in his refusal to judge others, to be so compelling and beautiful. His example changed me; I wanted to be less judgmental. That next fall, I went back to college, and gone was my disdain for football players and for those who noisily returned drunk to the dorms at night. So with apologies to Currie, there IS evidence out there of literature's positive effects: anecdotal evidence, at least. On the other hand, a few deranged murderers over the last century have cited the inspiration of Catcher in the Rye (whether the book actually pushed them over some brink is of course entirely speculative). I adore Salinger, and raise this example only to make the point that if some works can inspire us to greater humanity, perhaps other works may have the opposite effect.

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Through great literature one might gain: ---a better understanding of one's self ---a better understanding of other people and cultures ---better skills of writing and articulation ---better ability to think in complexities Do these equate with being a "better" person? That can't be said. For "moral" questions can be unique and complex according to circumstance. I think it could be fairly said, though, that improvement in the skills above better prepares a person to address moral questions.

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The idea that fiction makes us better is pretty new. In the early 19th century novels were a highly suspect genre, reviled for filling young peoples' heads with fancies and nonsense. Perhaps we should instead look at the historical process through which novels became "great" and (for some people) more like chores to complete than pleasures to read?

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Concerns over the morality of the novel were accompanied by strenuous efforts on the part of novelists to produce moral works, see Defoe, Swift, Richardson, etc, each of whose work justified its morality elaborately. The

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legacy of the "lesson" in the novel is still with us. We still have schlocky books, and we still have great books.

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Don't you remember Robert Frost reading his poem against the fierce wind at John Kennedy's Inauguration? We are searching, universities are searching, authors are searching for how to restore sanity, moral health, and compassion to people who are bombarded with TV advertisements which call Democrats "Dogs," Republicans "Cats," and anyone who still believes in Democracy a "prostitute." It is as if the Civil War had never taken place and we still aren't sure if people are objects to be manipulated or human beings. And few people have the courage to talk about what is really going on when the Congress uses the code words "abortion" or "taxes" to mean verbal or physical assault or murder. Genuine literature could not be printed under Totalitarian Regimes. We also don't have all the books and poetry that those executed writers would have written if they had lived. Writers and universities must find the courage and the skills to mirror to us what is really going on in our time. Otherwise, we will just take refuge in the great writers of the past, as Joseph Brodsky and his friends did while growing up under Stalin, living in our imaginations in the world as it "should" be. I still agree with Brodsky that the US is only moderately corrupt, but I think we are losing the courage to write and to teach "great" literature. To do that, we must be free to share who we are, and what is happening in the world within and around us......Sorry, I got so long winded.

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The folks I know who read 'great literature' tend to be deeply dissatisfied with the prevailing moral systems to which Mr. Currie refers. Serious engagement with a text shouldn't be an exercise in reinforcing established moral certitudes. If that's what we're after, we'd be wise to ditch the Dostoyevsky and tune into the 24-hour news cycle or renew our subscriptions to Reader's Digest.

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Are u serious? 1) Why is great literature in quotation marks? 2) Why the generalization about dissatisfied and its origin? 3) Reader's Digest is for 6-8 year olds: it gives them the scrubbed version of life and "moral certitude" and then: 4) So far, the 24 hour news cycle has NOT renewed my belief in the prevalence of reasoned morality in the world.

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If nothing else, literature connects us with other people, places, ideas, thoughts, feelings, even if all of the preceding are merely imaginary. Literature broadens our understanding of humanity. And if such things do not make us

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better people, then I do not know what does. What am I, an apparent simpleton, missing in this man's argument?

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All great art helps us transcend ourselves, and Literature is perhaps the greatest. Art, however you would like to define it (how we decide which works are entered into the canon are for another day), provides the reader both a mirror and a window into the human condition. Without it, we are confined to the cell of our own thoughts and experiences. Interpretation of all great art is firmly rooted in the relativity of experience. Any study of the effects of reading Literature must be correlated accordingly. If there is only one good effect from reading literature it is the knowledge that we are not alone in our daily struggles or in our personal tragedies.

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Plato and I would like to encourage Dr. Currie to go a step further and consider the possibility that fiction actually makes people worse. Consider the vanity of those readers who insist that their bookishness proves their moral superiority. This is but one example of their vice. Furthermore, anyone who thinks reading Oscar Wilde or the Marquis de Sade (to use some extreme examples) makes one morally better has missed the point entirely. If literature is good, it's because it is good-in-itself. It doesn't make people better. Far from it! Western literature has been vicious from its beginnings: "Sing o goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans!"

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I just thought it made you better able to appreciate complex thoughts and situations, and have a higher level of Aesthetic appreciation. But better as in more moral? I suppose that would depend on the impact and meaning of the book and its inherent quality. I should think that the Hobbit would teach self-reliance and the joys of exploration better than a lower quality book with the same message. I should think the texts we are taught to revere should teach some values: I think that I respect hospitality so much because of its classical importance as Xenia under Zeus. But in "big data" empirical truth? I don't know, although some software engineer should respond to this piece by seeking the answer.

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Great literature usually has the quality of feeling real and contemporary, so it is easy for people to be drawn into it and to find many things that resonate with ones' feelings and experiences. When one is open and welcoming it's easy to absorb new viewpoints and attitudes presented in the work by the author. There is no need to list all the works that do these things to readers. Often people are similarly affected by strong personalities with whom we sometimes come in contact. But does the recognition of these new ideas lead to deep

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thought and consideration as to whether they make good sense and account for any contradictions with other knowledge one posses? Usually not. It's more likely that if such notions seem to resonate people just add them to their store of evidence for things which they already believe. The fundamental changes in ourselves comes from considerable conscientious efforts, not from new concepts found in literature nor from charismatic personalities.

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Looking to literature for examples of how to live, moral guidance, or characters to emulate seems like a pretty naive reading strategy. Truly great literature offers something far richer, and seems to be more about ambiguity, disruption and forcing the reader to read carefully "against the text" than it is about instruction, homilies, or feeling good.

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But when we get to the 20th century, the interrelationship between authors and society gets much more complex as Henry James, Ezra Pound and Eliot, Symbolists like Yeats and Rilke become estranged, alienated, at times contemptuous of bourgeois morality or its lack of morality that created WWI, lethal working conditions and strikes, and the Depression as society becomes increasingly materialistic. I sense your article is really addressed to this battle between the literary elitism which Eliot and his friends created and the befuddled public. Universities try to heal that gap at times. Perhaps the Propaganda warfare which Hollywood and the Media now conduct against the American People, trying to manipulate and brainwash us with lies and corrupt heroes is the bizarre legacy which George Orwell warned us about after WWII as he described a world which "prevents" the writing of literature as it tries to strangle free thought and a free press and publication industry. There is no doubt that "great" literature creates morality, just remember Robert Kennedy addressing a Black crowd after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He tried to turn them away from violence by saying he had a brother shot down by a white man too, and then he quoted his favorite poet, Aeschylus, to try to help himself and all of them find some sanity in 1968. His brother who had saved the planet from Nuclear annihilation, was also assassinated.

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Currie makes a provocative point, but sidesteps the question of how we define "great" literature in the first place. If, for example, one sees literary greatness in the moral complexity and depth of a work, Currie may have an argument. But what if "great" literature's ultimate gift is the breadth of ideas that if offers -- that is, literature's ability to expand our range of experience beyond our lived worlds? Literature's value may then be less about the moral choices it teaches us how to make, and more about the diverse emotional, imaginative, and moral worlds to which great works expose us, thus teaching us to think about our own lives in more flexible and creative ways.

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OK, perhaps great literature doesn't make us moral, but it certainly tends to make a person interesting. My well-read friends tend to be worldly, ironic, concise, and funalso better at telling a good story and getting quickly to the essence of a conversation (unlike Professor Currie whose prose is repetitive, didactic and lacking in imagery, example, and story that makes writing compelling and convincing). A bit ironic that the author disproves his own contention in both form and content; his piece could use the techniques of successful fiction!

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I was wondering about the ;political, social context of this article. There is a national debate going on about how to beef up education performance, get students to perform better, teachers to teach better, do it all more economically with measurable achievement goals. I'm not all that clear there is a consensus on what education is although since it involves taxpayer money we probably define it in practical terms. Hard to prove great literature fits too well into this picture. As a nation ever more heterogeneous and with an expanding population we are going to need to learn to be more polite and civil with one another. Will reading great literature help us accomplish this? It probably wont hinder it, and might help, but hard to prove. I like to think of it in a more platonic way: that great works of art(which of course includes great literature) are an enhancement of our lives, good in themselves, good places for the mind to hang out. Getting into their realms is like learning what the ocean feels like to swim in ; the feel can;t be proven in advance; you have to plunge in , acquire a "taste" for it.

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The idea that great literature is meant to serve a didactic (moral) purpose was pretty much dispensed with after the 18th century. The first novels (here I am thinking of Clarissa, Pilgrim's Progress, etc.) were explicitly didactic and pretty much terrible. Thankfully writers such as Poe and Austen and eventually Tolstoy came along. Tolstoy wrote more thoughtfully about the complexity of life that perhaps any writer before or sense. The question is not whether reading Tolstoy (or any great writer) makes one a better person. The question is whether the questions that great literature probes could be explored otherwise? Tolstoy was certainly capable of writing philosophical treatise and yet he focused primarily on literature. Why? Philosophy does not deal well with the messiness of life (the Stoics were the last philosophers to even try). Great writers compose literature because there is no other way of saying what they wish to say. We read for the same reason. To try to boil this down to an argument that literature does or does not make readers better people is what a philosopher would do -and it misses the entire point.

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Thanks for mentioning Tolstoy. After his spiritual conversion, he "stopped" writing literature except for a few moral novellas and also some

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parables intended for peasants to help them see Christian truths through folktales. He became more and more devoted to living out and teaching non violence and a 1st century Christianity. He desperately worked to find a non violent path to reform Tsarist Russia, corresponding with Gandhi and teaching non violence to Martin Luther King as well through his pacifist writings. Sadly, his dream was not realized in Russia, but it did gain some success in India and in the US Civil Rights Movement. Strange that writing the great novels of the 19th century led him, or educated him to a path of Christian simplicity and humility. Every Black and White person in America is living under the grace of Tolstoy's legacy. Some of his vision was expressed in literature, some of it in his remarkable Christian life. His novels and religious writings influenced thousands of people throughout the world, both intellectual leaders and common ordinary people who have never heard his name. I can't think of better evidence than Tolstoy.

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We certainly do have "evidence" that literature shapes the ethical behavior of society. We call this evidence History. If Dickens had not exposed the terrible conditions of the urban poor under increasing industrialization, the settlement houses in England and America would not have developed the Social Work Movement when they did. Before Dickens, many of the upper classes in England were not even moved by Swift's A Modest Proposal! Without Uncle Tom's Cabin, the abolitionist movement in America would have had a much more difficult battle. Without Wordsworth and the Romantic Poets, the "feelings" of common people were ignored. And as Huck Finn said as he watched the Runaway Slave Jim cry over his children, "I guess they have feelin's just like a white man. It don't seem natural, but I guess they do." Huck Finn and the American public had to "learn" that black people are human beings, after Twain gave us the first fully drawn portrait of a black man in popular literature.

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Dickens was a very great novelist, maybe the best in the English language. But he had his effect on the terrible conditions of his time not because he was a great writer, but because he was a popular writer. If he had been published in a vacuum, he would have had no effect on history at all. At the same time, if he had been only popular and not great, his effect would still have been the same. If Stephen King ever turned moralist, his work could have more lasting effect on the world than that of all the writers published in The Nation, The Claremont Review, The New York Review of Books and, yes, The New York Times.

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Wow - for the writer to actually think that reading great literature is not beneficial in framing ones life's work and thoughts is pretty ludicrous. Great literature and classics help in a multitude of ways. For starters high school

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students can learn the entire SAT vocabulary by reading the first 30 pages of Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. There really is no need to go to test prep courses if one can understand and synthesize one or two of the great classics every summer starting middle school grades. >Great literature also contains profound thought that when understood and analyzed helps teach the student critical thinking skills which are very important skills needed to sustain a thriving democracy!

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I think this is one of those examples where the question demands a quantitative and methodical answer where there is none. Who can put a number on how much one's life is bettered by reading Dostoevsky? Is it bettered in linear proportion to the number of novels read? Is it proportional to the culturally established value of the novel? What kind of diagnostic tests would distinguish between the betterment of an avid reader vs. the betterment (or lack thereof) of a sporadic or non-literature reader? To my mind, there are many human activities and products that should be valued simply because of the subjective measures of enjoyment and enrichment each of us associates with them. I'm a scientist who loves to read, and I have never felt the need to quantify my experience with literature or defend my time reading with objective measures of how much my life is better because of it.

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Very interesting article, philosophically; however, I am surprised that the writer has not done his research since there are indeed several studies that link the reading of "great literature" with human improvement. With a quick google, I was able to find one of the many I've read about in the past, this one from the Daily Mail, UK: "...Researchers at the University of Liverpool found the prose of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the like had a beneficial effect on the mind, providing a 'rocket-boost' to morale by catching the reader's attention and triggering moments of self-reflection. ... The research also found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory', which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read. The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books. ... . 'The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike,' said Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre." Here's the link to the article:

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2261636/ReadingShakespea...

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Part of the problem with this essay is the false dichotomy which the author presents - either literature or not literature. This is not a real choice which anyone faces. Everyone engages with a wide range of representations of human actions and passions in an attempt to reflect on what is going on in their lives and world (I include here songs, movies, news stories, jokes, and so on). The questions, then, are whether the qualities of these representations influence the kind and degree of understanding which people arrive at (answer: yes, obviously), and whether any one genre (such as "the classics") is superior to the others (answer: somewhat, but not in any exclusive way). If you just stand back, it is quiet simple to see the value of literature: different cultures have different cultural understandings. They come to and maintain these understandings through their cultural practices. Literature is one of ours. If we value that part of our culture in which we reflect at length on people's subjectivities, we will continue to engage with it. If we dont, that aspect of our culture will wither.

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To help moral decision making educated people should (and do) read Mein Kamph. It's an important reference in this age when we search for community spirit, but hopefully avoid Volksgmeindshaft. I think of serious fiction as highlighting the human side of complex moral situations - not the morally correct path.

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You should try Hitler's Hugo-winning science-fiction novel "The Iron Dream".

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At long last people willing to study whether overly verbose literature is good for you. I remember wading through Dickens, who was paid by the word to write stories for serial chapters in magazines. It was to his benefit to use too many words. It took me a long time to read the boring stories when I could have used the time to study something that was actually worthwhile. Reading non fiction is much more helpful in learning about the world. I believe some schools are trying it. Fiction is without authenticity. Any small amount of knowledge gleaned from fiction is not worth the waste of time to wade through a whole book of made up tales. I am not speaking from ignorance. I read as many words as those who devour fiction but it is a waste of my time to use it on fiction. Last year someone was teaching a computer to tell fiction from non fiction. I can tell from the first sentence. If there is you much description and you could say it with fewer words then it is definitely fiction.

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If one enjoys reading fiction go for it. Don't belittle those of us who read non fiction, especially when reading fiction doesn't make you a better or more educated person. I can guarantee that I have not missed out on any piece of knowledge by not reading a made up story.

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Dear S.L., I agree, in part, with your comments. However, I feel that they do not deal with the question this article was putting forth. Although Fiction vs. Nonfiction was talked about, albeit briefly, the main argument dealt with the benefits of "Great Literature" (Could be fiction, also could not), and if they exist at all. Both Fiction and Nonfiction hold knowledge worth gleaning, but, assuredly, not just Nonfiction exclusively. I mean, if all works were those that were purely factual or proven, where would all of our sensitivity, cultural distinctiveness, and creativity find themselves? I urge you to reassess the importance of both Fiction and Nonfiction, and how they enhance and feed off of one another. They exist mutually, and if either one of these two categories did fade away or ceased to be read, the other would soon follow.

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Then you are missing the wisdom in Shakespeare's great plays to give just one example of fiction worth reading. Yes, they are "made up" stories but they put into words his marvelous knowledge of human nature and teach us about life in ways we ourselves may never experience.

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Where was there any belittlement of non-fiction readers ? You sound like a high school student complaining about the next reading assignment. "Oh god we have to read twenty pages!". Surely you realize that Dickens and the others have not lasted in the popular conciousness and on the bookstore shelves all this time if people (other than yourself) did not find his work and the work of countless others, both inspiring and entertaining. Think of how even the very idioms of our language are penetrated by his words and phrases as they are with those of Shakespeare and the King James bible. Since your mind is clearly closed on the subject, I would not waste time trying to convince you with any of the myriad examples of beauty, laughter, joy and adventure that is to be found in well written fiction. When I read I am transported to the times and places described. I feel along with the characters and see their actions in my minds eye. This is the joy of great literature and why so many of us love books, especially the great works of fiction from all around the world. I am sorry for you that you cannot see or feel or understand it and think of you as having a kind of blindness. As a systems engineer I also love the hard technical reading of science, logic and mathematics, but have never considered my time with Dickens and O'Brian and Asimov and Heinlein and Fraser so many others

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anything but a complement to the way my mind works and the depth of my knowledge and undertstanding

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I suspect that literature offers not moral improvement but improvement to readers' social competence, exposing readers to a wide range of social experience and character types to which they would otherwise not have access. Of course, I have no real evidence for this theory, and it might well be that the kinds of people drawn to literature, both as writers and readers, are those who are already highly attuned to their social mileus and to subtle variations in the motives and emotions of the people who surround them and that literature is therefore a consequence of social competence, not its cause.

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I've never felt any connection in myself between reading and moral sensibility. But I have felt that reading ignites my imagination, helps me see connections between things in front of me and things further afield, and makes me more empathetic or compassionate towards those pursuing unfortunate lives. I am less likely to jump to sanctimonious conclusions about the beggar on the street. I see my own or family members' struggles as more like those of others and less unique or bound only to the here and now. All that in addition to the enjoyment of reading about people and places far outside my own time or place.

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Literature is a time-tested human way of communicating ideas, feelings, and experiences. To omit this from education is to ignore a big chunk of human knowledge. I disagree with the author making "morality" the rationale for a literary upbringing. While literary fiction may more likely promote "humanism" than literary non-fiction, there are still plenty of works out there (Yukio Mishima, for example) whose idea of morality would likely be unpalatable to the article's author. Question: Whose morality are we hoping to inculcate others with?

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Is it good for us to read literary fiction? It's a silly question. The author could equally ask if it's good for us to study a work of Bach, or view a painting by Gauguin, or watch the sun set on a wilderness lake. So what's good for us? Eating more fruits and vegetables.

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I feel that greater understanding (and that includes understanding what is right or wrong, good or bad) comes from asking questions. What good literature does for me is make me ask questions; of myself and of my society. The writer will tease those questions out of me through a complex characters and a rich story. I don't find those questions in pulp fiction.

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This is a pretty shallow commentary on the value of literature. It's mired in the kind of instrumentalism that has humanities departments (philosophy included, Prof. Currie) fighting for their lives. The author thinks that "we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being," ignoring the possibility that one of the things we might value in a human being is being widely read and culturally literate. Not because these things are necessarily helpful in pursuit of other goals, or because they are morally improving. I'm reminded of physicist Robert Wilson's response when testifying before a Senate subcommittee as to the value of the research to be conducted at Fermilab. When asked how it would help us with respect to defending our country from the Russians, Wilson responded, ''It has nothing to do with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.''

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Well said. My alma mater's English program is a sinking ship because of this sort of accounting. Perhaps the next post will be "Does Literature Create Enough Jobs?"

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When I teach literature to my students, and we discuss it in class, I watch their moral understanding grow right before my eyes. With Antigone, they grapple with the limits of loyalty and duty. With the Great Gatsby, they struggle with their own materialism, and have to wonder what their own values might be. With Sula, we inhabit various kinds of male and female characters, if only for a moment, and their adolescent brains flirt with relativism. I can't imagine another activity that would have a similarly useful impact but then again, I've spent my life in classrooms, teaching English, so I can't help but imagine it's time well spent.

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It's interesting that, while many commenters and the author of this piece argue that great literature refines our moral sensibilities, nobody seems to ask whether this would also indicate that bad literature (or art or movies or video games) undermines the morals of its audience. Would literature's causal effect somehow be effective in only one direction? I suspect that the author and most commenters would argue that, somehow, while it is self-evident that great art elevates, it is not quite so evident that tawdry, violent, pornographic, myopic art undermines its audience's morals.

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I think there are many people, myself included, who do think that " tawdry, violent, pornographic, myopic art" undermines the moral development of humans...especially when young people are raised on a diet of trash and don't get exposed to more complex narratives or have a competent guide to

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help them think through the issues presented. The research isn't there yet, either direction, because we only know how to measure short-term effects.

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C. S. Lewis made exactly this argument in defence of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry. I still think the argument has validity. Thank you for bringing us back to it.

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How shall we define "evidence"? Are we so sure that it's always best to use one human invention -- scientific method -- as the yardstick for measuring the value of every other human invention? How shall we define "value"? Scientific method depends on the notion that within defined parameters "objectivity" is not an abstraction but at least roughly achievable. Even if we accept that, how about those parameters: who defines them? How? On the other side of this coin are the relativistic, subjective, "soft" methodologies -experiential and even empirical, though not the empiricism that claims to be "objective". Call it "proximate empiricism." People who are not captivated by reading until late in life do seem to claim that their lives become richer and more nuanced than before. Most readers of To Kill A Mockingbird seem to claim that their understanding of American racism deepens and that their empathies change, at least in some way. I also hope we're defining literature as inclusive of the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, Lincoln's Second Inaugural -certainly Whitman's original Song of Myself? If so there's ample evidence (perhaps anecdotal, but look at the mass of it!) that these human inventions changed many, many minds -- opening, expanding, troubling them -- which changed human ideas about justice. Of course these are also abstractions. But can we remember that Scientific Method is not the pathway to "truth". Like literature, it's a human creation.

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I remember the story of one India monk who was visiting America on early twentieth century. He asked his superior before his departure from India how I can spread the message of Indian religion to a foreign country - I do not know them?. His superior asked him to take the best American frictions with him during his long sea voyage and read them. You will know them. He did that - and his American disciples later wrote about his enjoyable interactions with them. Great literatures are the windows to view the human experiences - and there are infinite experiences. The exposure to these experiences helps the mind to set the bearings of life, other wise life will be rudderless. Impression created on our Frontal Cortex through direct and indirect experiences controls the emotional response of the Limbic brain. Without that control, we are nothing but human animals. No doubt for a meaningful life reading Great Literatures is a necessity.

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Moral expertise seems to be what this author is hoping to find in literature. It occurs to me that in our "christian" nation most of that is to be found in the Bible - a book not proven to be written by anyone other than men. So, it seems to me that literature is an excellent place to find another kind of moral expertise with another way of viewing the world from many more perspectives than the "bible." There are, of course, other avenues to search including from parents, schools, friends, history, etc.

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The author was obviously being paid by the word, since he could have said as much in half the length. Sure, one would like to have tangible evidence that reading great literature is good for you, but to dismiss personal experience and perception is silly. If I think a particular teacher had a large positive impact on my education, is there any reason to doubt my belief? No, because I had lots of teachers, some good and some not so good, and if one stood out in a positive way, I can be pretty sure; I was there. So, if I've read a few books, in addition to the other experiences in my life from which I have learned things, why would I be unable to distinguish those that had an influence and those that did not?

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Did reading this essay make me a better person? It didn't make me laugh, and I read it in 45 seconds (it was a predictable piece)... so, probably not. The real question about these "passive activities" of reading "literature" (stories), listening to music, watching movies, looking at art, watching sports-- maybe it's better to actually do something: write, play, sing, talk, all in equal measure. We all need to go out and play for awhile, and tell each other stories.

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1. One's "awareness" of a thing certainly increases upon exposure to that thing. 2. Literature includes morality. 3. Therefore one's awareness of morality increases upon exposure to literature. What a person does with their new found awareness is another matter. For some people there are stronger forces than exposure to morals can overcome. Greed comes to mind.

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Reading the great classics of literature, going back to the ancient Greek authors, continuing with the literature of the Renaissance, and on to modern literature, which is vaster in number of books than ever, obviously related to population growth since Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euripedes, Aristophanes et.al. wrote their tomes...has its place in higher education, although there is no correlation with adult behavior of those who have read them. One might easily think that there is a correlation, but given that all or mostly all lawyers have first gone to college, and many to the Ivy League

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schools and the excellent universities scattered all around the USA, and ditto for MDs, there is plenty of amoral behavior committed by a small cohort of these well-educated persons. Just consider that most people in our House of representatives, both the Senate and the Congress, are lawyers. They are not exactly paradigms of morality and humaneness, nor have they ever been. In fact, it is the rare politician who is honest and devoted to the folks he or she represents. In my own profession, there are many MDs who I knew to be psychopaths, despite their fine reputations as skilled in the specialty of their choice. I think that morality is in our DNA, and tots know when they are being unfairly treated. They seem to know right from wrong. Those who do not, if not punished for bad behavior, will be more likely to become what is now called antisocial personality types. Psychopaths.

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The presupposition of this essay, that the qualities of what we call "Great Literature" and the values which it expresses can or should be evaluated in quantitative terms, is symptomatic of the current bankruptcy of the terms of every mode of discourse in our modern world. If nothing else, the works which survive the winnowing process of the centuries give us a connection to our own past as well as a window onto the diversity of the best thought of other cultures in our shrinking world. It helps us to understand that there ARE in fact certain HUMAN verities which are part and parcel our species and its continued existence on this tiny planet in a remote corner of the universe. Exercising the effort and the discipline to step outside our own very narrow view of things should have the same value as a regimen of healthy diet and exercise has for maintaining a healthy body. The regular exercise of the intellectual and emotional faculties for those who are willing to take the time are a comparable tool to maintaining our mental health, which should include a substantial dose of humility, patience, and tolerance. Whether the means is the study of the Mahabarata and its core document, the Gita, the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dante or the Tao Te Ching, just to scratch the surface of what is available, the development of our critical faculties are all that is going to keep us from self destructing or destroying our habitat like a yeast colony. "Better"? You bet.

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The opening assertion that I would agree with the hypothesis that exposure to challenging work of literary fiction is good for us is presumptuous, and revealing in the sense that the author, and apparently many of the commentators, has not and have not been very reflective, analytical, or skeptical about received wisdom. I leave it to to the liberal artists to debate the relative merits of reading Proust vs watching South Park, but for me, they're both fiction, and not as interesting as reading (in no particular order) history, sociology, psychology, biology, physics, philosophy, news, or even selfimprovement books ( with appropriate effort to distinguish the fictional content

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in all of the preceding). Also better than reading fiction: talk, walk, write, and do.

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If a girl of 13 and you have been fed with Anna Karenina, Eugnie Grandet and The Princess of Clves, you may start to hedge about men while your sense of morality is being finely honed. 'Gone With The Wind', however, may leave you with a feeling of hope. War and Peace is magnificent but you might really fall in love with Holden Caulfield; he's funny, sad and for real. The Classics?..."She was reading the Greats, as classics and philosophy were called at Oxford. It was what all the clever people read who weren't scientists and it was completely useless" (Alice Thomas Ellis). Murdoch stated that philosophers did not make for great authors, including Plato. Fortunately, she wrote about 27 novels and helped this reader; perhaps for the better. Some of us do know the way we are and that there is always room for improvement. The choices we make? Accrued experience, logic and imagination may help us when more mature. Stories of murder, loss, abuse, fatal illnesses, scandals, etc.? Perhaps they cheer us up in a morbid way although I avoid these like the plague, including Camus' classic. Such tales probably are not meant to refine us emotionally but leave us feeling less stressed and with a detached feeling of solace? All to say, I read mainly fiction and psychological novels, children's literature past and present, and some of the Greats. Both. Thank you, Professor Currie, for your article. Yours hopefully on the way to bettering myself, George Bowling

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assumption that morality is necessarily about being caring? The Nazis (your example) certainly didn't use art to that end. Even Homer didn't. Or maybe I should just cut to the chase and say that no, I don't need any "proof" that literature does what it so obviously does. That would be like needing proof that the sky is blue. Now you may not in fact know that literature does what it does, but that just means that you don't get literature, not that knowing that literature does what it does is merely a matter of faith. Not everyone is equally sensitive to art (and yes, that *has* been scientifically demonstrated -- it correlates with sensitivity to hypnosis). And of those who are sensitive to art, not everyone is intellectually equipped to appreciate the difference between good and great art (or even, for that matter, bad and good art). Given a bit of time and space, it's easy enough to explain what role literature and art in general have in human society, and why they have evolved as a tool to spread social memes. Experiments could be done to demonstrate this, and they might be interesting. But proof that art does what it does? Not

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necessary, save perhaps for the few who don't appreciate art, or those who can't appreciate greatness in art -- and what good would it do them?

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The author seems to have inadvertently cited more evidence for the value of literature than evidence against it. While I admire the spirit of epistemological rigor here, I have to point out that the author's incessant use of the word "better" spoils the entire inquiry. In fact, I think it illustrates pretty clearly that the pursuit of literary enlightenment has little to do with explicit moral or social "improvement." Is the better person an opportunist who makes billions and pumps money into the economy, or is it a martyr who inspires others to selflessness? The fact that this is a wholly subjective value judgment should indicate that perhaps the value of literature is also inherently subjective. This is not the same as "faith." The only resemblance is the initial axiom that to seek new knowledge is worthwhile - the same assumption that scientists make. Otherwise, both the billionaire and the martyr stand to gain nuanced perspective simply by experiencing the unique insight that literature provides. Film can do this in its own way, as can poetry, or music, or indeed any thoughtprovoking experience. But - historically, at least - literature has proven itself efficient because it is art that combines both thoughts and feelings into words that mirror our own experiences. If you need scientific evidence for this, then you have to expand your inquiry to art itself.

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I don't know what direct effect reading great literature has had on the quality of my character, but in terms of life enrichment and artistic growth as a painter, my sense of the world would be smaller without Dickens, Dostoevsky and Joyce and the great poets Yeats and Hopkins, to name a few. Great literature, great music, great art they have given me ideals to live by, inspired me in my own work and expanded my compassion for others.

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You got it , Max , my dear . I am an old woman who spent her working years teaching literature to high school students. Enrichment is the only thing I ever sought for myself and for them, and I shared that with them.And you know what, they also "got it". I'm not sure what outside influences can guarantee higher morality and finer character. The whole Holocaust experience should cast some doubt on that, given the intellectual and artistic history of Germany at that time. However, I do believe that beautiful language provides those of us without poetic talent with special insight into our own thoughts, doubts and dreams.

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I would characterize this piece along with Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." It's purpose is to elicit reaction. I don't need any scientific evidence to

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be assured that my liberal arts education and my continued reading of good literature and history has expanded my vocabulary, my imagination, and my framework of reference for all things human. While knowledge of the multiplication tables and other basic arithmetic and algebraic functions are occasionally useful to me on a practical basis and certainly have sharpened my mind, there are a lot of things I know of others' experiences from history and literature. Is it the same as living their experiences? Probably not. But reading has made me a more complete person.

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this argument pins too much on straw men and individual outcomes. there's incontestable evidence that the educational attainment necessary to read, discuss and "appreciate" great works of literature (e.g., a high school education), applied across all members of a culture, has a profoundly positive effect on society overall. the idea that a specific educational treatment can produce reliable ethical results across all individuals is inherently indefensible. the obvious proof: a religious upbringing cannot guarantee an ethical adult, and religious training is far more focused on ethical outcomes than are literature studies.

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I remember being moved as a high school freshman by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings "The Yearling." I bawled like a baby after I finished the tear jerker "Love Story" Neither was great literature. The authors did, however, know how to touch our emotions. These are 2 different qualities. Effective advertising (I'm thinking Hallmark cards) can also influence us. They have the power to encourage the viewer to make moral decisions, but no one ever confused a tv commercial with classic literature.

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Humans are story-telling animals, and there is a lot of current research in a variety of fields about stories and, for instance, cultural transmission. That said, I don't think of "great literature" as a privileged kind of storytelling when it comes to shaping culture. I think the great novelists use the common tools of storytelling for aesthetic and imaginative effect, and are much more likely to be doing so to question accepted moral understandings than to reinforce them. I happen to love reading, but suspect a lot of people have been dissuaded from reading challenging work because it was presented as being "good for them."

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So science is going to teach us that being dumb and uneducated makes us just as functional members of the consumer society as anyone else. In fact, reading books is a distraction from time spent shopping or thinking about shopping. And god forbid we should read about history or obtain views about civilization and humanity from sources other than our daily media before casting our votes. Since nothing we hold to be of value can be proven to have

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value we might as well abandon our illusions and fill our brains with downloaded sound bites.

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Reading activates the mind's eye. It opens windows to worlds beyond one's own experience. Some people those who are curious about what lies beyond their own world, those who are conceptual, intuitive, imaginative, idea people by natureare prone to understand the value of something like literature in terms of their experience with it. They don't require empirical evidence to see its importance. Further, those who are drawn in by the power and beauty of expression through language, are drawn to *great* literature. Here's how *great* happens: one of these people reads a book and says, "see here, this moved me; it added something to my understanding of the world and of the mystery of life and human nature." The evidence of the importance of any *good* literature lies in how it enriches their lives. Not everyone who reads great literature and is moved by it has an advanced education or would consider themselves to be an intellectual. The beauty of literature, and of any great art, is available like never before to many. But, at this same moment in history, we, as a culture are becoming increasingly disinterested at working to spend time with things that will deepen our experience of our own feeling, of our own humanity. And so, we become obsessed with asking withering questions like, "can we empirically measure the value and benefit of literature, poetry, etc."

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Better people? Who knows? More thoughtful people, perhaps; more willing to accept the complexity of experience. But what most interested me about Professor Currie's argument is that he is a philosopher and cites other philosophers in his argument for the benefit of reading, of all things, fiction! And indeed just about every commentator on this site writes only about the novels they've read. Perhaps if we want to be better people we should read only philosophy, history, and mathematics. Perhaps we should study historical linguistics and read Greek and Latin. As Professor Currie undoubtedly knows, Plato would have banned the reading of fiction in his republic (except for philosophers!) because in his opinion it gave us false ideas about moral and religious values. As far as Plato was concerned, The Iliad did not make most people better, but worse. Perhaps what's wrong with the modern world-modern America, anyway--is that when educated people talk about literature they almost exclusively mean one or another kind of fiction, or, from Plato's point of view, one or another kind of lie.

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I think the comments have hovered around fiction because that was what was discussed in the essay. I don't think it goes any deeper than that.

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I read a lot of these comments, but not all. What characterizes all that I read is their focus on the individual experience of a work of literature. But literature is a corpus of works, starting with Homer and flowing luxuriously down into our own day. No one can know the whole corpus, but the more of it you experience, the broader your sense of human possibilities of both good and evil. Also, and perhaps more important, the deeper your insight into the shifting values that human beings have lived by or revolted against through time. I suggest two authors who have developed this historical sense of literature: Northrop Frye, a literary critic, and Charles Taylor, a philosopher. We need to put both literature and philosophy into a historical context to draw value from them. The attempt to analyze a work of literature out of time and in a dissecting laboratory simply misses the point of literature. Equally, philosophy innocent of the history of philosophy is dead.

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Zach: I did not say all I said "an awful lot of what I read"etc. so there is no absolute involved. What makes a classic a classic to any individual is how over the years the readers respond to it and I did not respond well to Clarissa, Pamela, the Vicar of Wakefield, etc. all English literature classics. I also found many of the poets I studied (and I love poetry) a waste of time. As for the Russians, yes, Karamazoc and Crime and Punishment were worth reading but I'm not sure they has as much moral impact to me as the "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" or Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," both of which significantly impacted my moral thinking. I've recently been reading Philip Larkin's poems and have a hunch he will become a classic a hundred years from now. As for the Greek "classics" no way. All imagination and no reality. One last thing, i believe that the age one is when a book is read is a critical factor in how the reader responds. I started reading both Eliot and Hemingway in the late twenties and have reread all their works over the years ... some several times. It is sort of like a joy rid back into the past because I am now almost 83 years old.

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How could the mere act of reading--accompanied by discussion, exegesis, critical assessment, political assimilation, or not--ever ensure moral development? That can only be the opiate of a certain brand of intellectuals; a self-justification spun for those able to pay a salary. Literature has always been an art, a game, an exercise that has resiliently proved itself both less and more useful than the ideologies of its would-be users.

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The impact of great literature in developing a reader's moral or emotional sense, depends on the reader's current state of moral/emotional development, (maturity), and the reader's efforts in assimilating the literature. And it would seem to follow that the impact of such literature would also vary

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in both intensity and longevity, in correspondence with the maturity and efforts of the reader. So, in order to study the effects of literature, one would have to take these two variables into account, and select a group of people whose maturity and efforts were similar enough to constitute a controlled group, and then test the impact of various literature on them, in both intensity and longevity. But isn't this just what we are doing now our post-secondary educational institutions? And so, the teachers in these institutions have already performed these experiments over and over again, and can readily tell us what conclusions can be drawn.

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I would not go so far as to say that students in post-secondary educational institutions are uniform in their maturity and effort. As someone who has taught in such an institution, I can confidently say that there is a great variability of maturity, ability, interest, preparation, and effort amongst such students.

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Do we really have to justify reading good literature? Must everything be "good for you?" How about we just read because we want to read. But I suspect more is at work here. I can just see entire literature departments cut because they can't prove their work is a worthwhile contribution to education. www.valhallapress.com

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you make reading a great book sound so boring. great literature is brain exercise, possibly the best there is. you need all your resources of memory, vocabulary and logic to fathom, say, moby dick, or as I lay dying, or middlemarch. that's the power here. reading literature can teach you how to think.

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Yes. "Reading literature can teach you how to think," unlike, in my case, philosophical argument which merely bores me to death.

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I can't answer your question. But I can say this about my own experience. When I was in high school, you couldn't have paid me to read "Vanity Fair", "Moby Dick" or "The Scarlet Letter". However, as an adult, I've come to enjoy these classics through the wonder of audiobooks. I can see now why they are considered classics and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to each one. To those who are skeptical about the value of classic literature (and especially those who think they don't have time to read), I say please give audiobooks a try. Visit your local libray and check one out -- I promise you won't be disappointed.

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great writers -from Cervantes to Flaubert- wrote great novel exploring the harm that reading novels causes in readers' minds. Maybe tongue in cheek, but surely they knew whereof they wrote?

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It's not all that hard, really, even if the particular question is the wrong question-- why not ask "Does great literature *change* us?"-- or is finally unanswerable. The mind, or the brain if you prefer, does a great many things to get itself through the day, and "literature" represents more or less exotic and alien variants of these (often mundane) activities, which are made recognizable and understandable to us. We are the things that cathect, and we are evidently quite happy to invest intangibles-- ideas, religious beliefs, emotional constructs-- as well as tangible objects with mental and emotional energy. That, simply, is the ground of our fascination with literature. Literature is a form of communication that asks us to invest in ideas and worldviews that may not be our own, and to act as if they are, or could be, ours for the duration. When done well, it prods at one or more of our many limits and seeds our phenomenological ground, whatever that might mean to you. Whether this means that literature *bestows* something that we might value as "good," or simply tweaks how our poor brains cope with the welter of information the world throws at them, may vary from person to person, or even from moment to moment within the same person. Aesthetic reward and moral enlightenment are not guaranteed, but nor are they forbidden or mutually exclusive. Literature gives us something in which we can invest, and then some moral or intellectual change happens, or does not.

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I agree, the wrong question may have been asked. Perhaps the inquiry should begin with the nature of the crime? Was it ever about the reader?

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Whether one's Proust-reading friend is the way she is because she read Proust, or she read Proust because she was already that way -- that question may not be that important. The fact is she is that way and she read Proust. She and Proust got together. How many people read Proust, after all? You have to be pretty open and curious and sensitive and nonjudgemental and patient to read over three thousand pages with some very long sentences and paragraphs, including long passages about jealousy, unrequited love, clouds, and pastry. It's sort of like the question of intelligence and vocabulary. They tend to go together, though there are some very intelligent people who have smaller vocabularies than you would expect -- people growing up without books or other exposure to a wide variety of words.

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Sensitive, moral, enlightened people usually find great literature -- or it finds them, just like people tend to find like-minded friends, including some who are better informed, more sensitive, moral and enlightened than they are. Of course college is (or used to be) structured to to provide such a good meeting with those authors with an exceptional ability to write of reality relatively free of prejudice and bias and unexamined hang-ups.

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Speaking as an English major who has read a lot of great literature: I have enjoyed reading literature immensely, but I do not think it has made me a better person. Indeed, if I had been blessed with talent in math and science or music or business, I believe I would be just as good a person as I am now, and also much better off financially.

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You're talking about defining a link - if one exists - between reading great books and achieving great character. I'm an ex-journalist who spent the better part of his life reading voraciously. Yet my son HATES fiction. Imagine Joltin' Joe raising a kid who not only disliked baseball, but felt it a worthless timesuck. Interestingly enough, he loves to read. Science manuals. Software blogs. Tech chat rooms and bulletin boards. At 15 he downloaded a calc textbook when he got bored with Trig. He taught himself Java online and aced the AP java test without taking a single java class in high school. And in case you're wondering if he has an undeveloped compassion module in his brain, he and several friends co-founed a not-for-profit to deliver nutritional supplements to pregnant women in Vietnam, and they delivered over 200,000 doses. We put the word "great" in great books, because out of milions of stories over time, mere thousands endured. But we cannot ascribe any magic quality of transference or enlightenment. Apparently, as my son's example shows, other forms of intellectual stimulation, aside from reading great books, do the same. If not more.

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I think the great literature does not teach, but it gives you an access to an emotional, moral and etc. experience that you might never had otherwise. It is then up to you to absorb this experience, to build it into you world view. And I don't mean to do it rationally, but simply because of the impact of a great art on our sentiments and feeling. Kind of Education Sentimentale to paraphrase Flaubert.

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Leave it to a philosopher to pose a question that no one can satisfactorily answer, not even himself. But I suggest that sheer aesthetic satisfaction can alter the soul to the point where the reader might think twice about committing some horrific act. And I agree with another responder that you can't blame

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books for the Nazis and other evildoers. The blame lies in the society and the people. By the way, do religious works--the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc.--count in the great literature? If so, then should the religions discard them as useless?

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Does the author believe great literature has made him, himself, a better person? If so, how has the author reached that conclusion. The greater value, to me, would have been the author's exploration of that individual question rather than discoursing on the vagaries of whether literature makes "us" better.

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You have challenged the "I have read more so I am superior" school of thought and threatened to the very core of progressive smugness. Watch out..

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Albert Einstein believed and said that "Adults" who read too much lose their ability to think. Having lived in a household with a voracious reader for almost 40 years, I'm inclined to believe he was correct on THAT thought......as well as everything else. Moderation seems to be the key, as usual.

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Makes us better people? Better than what? More moral and opposed to our less moral beginnings? More sensitive as opposed to our blockhead states of genesis? It does not teach us how to think, we already think. It can help us see more complicated models of thought, which may open us up to that level of thinking. It allows us to use imagination, which can be thereafter harnessed in other ways (but usually isn't). It, I think, is one of the best means of teaching history in a palatable way- and if ever we need to look at history for the sole purpose of not repeating it- not is the time for great literature.

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Excellent article. Did Hamlet change the world or not? Mario Vargas Llosa built his career, and won the Nobel Prize, on the supposition that literature can enrich . . . the entirety of human life. Indeed more than just enrich, Llosa thinks literature can also protect: Wit hout [literature]" he writes, "the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. Only in the words of great writers (not, pointedly, "trash" writing) can we find the "complex sum of contradictory truths" - what Llosa calls an "intigrating vision" that is a "totalizing and living knowledge of a human being." Literature, in other words, is not only helpful in understanding ourselves and improving the human condition; it is essential. Unfortunately, he does not provide any mechanism for this improvement, and no evidence is cited.

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Literature is replete with examples of moral and ethical dilemmas and how they are resolved or not. To the ancient Greeks, notions like hubris were a waring against arrogance and pride. Many of Shakespeare;s plays dealt with under what circumstances was regicide justified. In the eighteenth century it was a commonplace that literature should both teach and delight, hold the mirror up to nature and be instructed. Read Voltaire's Candide. Dickens' "Hard Times" is a critique of utilitarianism. There is not enough space to chronicle the examples of "lessons" rooted in the "human condition" that push our consciousness toward insights about ourselves and others. There is plenty of social science, history, philosophy and even science and mathematics in literature. I think its worth looking wider and deeper in what is called "literature" in its different forms to bring more clarity and perspective to the meaning events and what moral and ethical thinking is.

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No, great literature does not improve my life. Reading "Moby-Dick" only made me waste time daydreaming of great ocean voyages in another century. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" gave me nightmares about a vast corporate and government conspiracy to control me. "1984" made me paranoid about endless wars and the mechanized dehumanization of society. "Walden" gave me unreasonable hope about achieving a better world. Thank God the Internet came along to save me from all that.

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". . . shipmates, Sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers." --Father Mapple, Moby Dick

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Great literature is not some sort of "silver bullet cure" for poor morals. But I think that for the majority of us, great literature serves as a kind of gravity. Gravity is considered a very weak force, but while it may not be enough to pull our Earth into the Sun, it is enough to cause us to orbit the Sun. Likewise, I think that great literature, by giving us ASPIRATIONS for a certain way of life or what have you, slowly exerts its gravity upon us, causing us to "orbit" around humane perspectives and values. Great literature provides us, to some extent, with the Platonic form of how life could or should be. By reading of, say, great and noble deeds, we can judge ours and others' actions--does it measure up or not? Consider for a moment "The Andy Griffith Show." There was never a real Mayberry, where life was slow and gentle, where everyone seemed to pretty much get along. And yet we loved it. Why? Because we ASPIRED to that. Not because we could attain it, but because we ASPIRED to attain it. Thus, when we saw racism or hatefulness, many of us were repulsed, for we had in mind a "form" of what a good society looked like.

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Great literature doesn't magically fix things. But if negative literature can create dissonance within us, then surely the opposite can happen. It may not transform us instantly, but then again, it may. There are millions of people, I imagine, that would claim that the Bible, for instance, has brought them comfort, joy, and direction.

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Great writers refrain from answering moral questions, they ask the questions and there in lies their contribution to our collective understanding of human nature

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I try to read a received work of literature every so often because such books are, um, well gosh darn -- they're good reads. A masterful author uses language in ways that startle and thrill me. The characters in "great literature" capture the imagination, and become real to me. And every so often, the curtain that hides the deepest mysteries of life is pulled aside, in the flash of a word or phrase that leaves me stunned. Sometimes I am haunted for years. Often, I refer to the book in one conversation or another, because its depiction of character or circumstance are so incisive that they serve as exemplars for years to come. If reading a good book is like taking medicine for you, read something else.

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Tell me a story. We read to ourselves and we read to others. Before the written word the stories were part of a great oral tradition. Fiction, fact, myth and legend. Stories oral and written bind us together. They tell us our past. They inform our present. They help us navigate the future. Some stories resonate all on their own while others are a puzzle until we have more life experiences. We are better, emotionally richer and more complete human beings because of them. So please tell and read stories!

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The article sets up a straw man type of equivalency that, appearances to the contrary, is irrelevant to why great art of any kind is "valuable". It also unconsciously subscribes to that most damaging of modern assumptions: great art must be "useful" in order to justify its value - it must "do something": make us better, make us smarter, educate, inform . . . as if "Anna Karenina" were the equivalent of the telephone or the microwave or the Suzuki method of teaching music. I remember reading "Anna Karenina" for the first time, since the author brings this particular work up, and how Tolstoy's ability to bring us into his characters' minds and to them so frighteningly real in all their flawed humanity stunned me. To this day, a month seldom goes by that i do not recall some scene in the novel. About 20 years ago, the Met brought an exhibition of Van Gogh's work over. A friend and I went, and there we saw one of the "Crow Flying Over a

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Wheatfield" - the little knot of people around the painting were utterly silent, as we all wondered how the artist had managed to represent Death with a thunderous sky, a bird, and a wheatfield. My friend had recently lost her father; as she looked at the painting, tears began to well up. We turned away from it without saying a word. The experience of great art doesn't "do" anything - it is, itself, the point and the result. Mr. Currie has fallen into the pit of thinking that art has to "do" something. He is wrong.

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It's also unproven that Mozart wrote beautiful music. The fact that it won't ever be proven is primary to its beauty and to its value to us. Only in an age like this could we see a column predicated on a dialectic so painfully unromantic and obtuse.

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Amen. The author and the article and all the funders who demand of museums and orchestras and theaters that they somehow demonstrate a "result", rather than ensure that we all have access to creations that at a minimum, bestow an experience of beauty and wonder upon us, take out of ourselves, and remind us that in the midst of a world of greed, brutality, corruption, injustice, and mortality . . . a few of us exhibit abilities that redeem us just a bit from the amoeba-like cesspool from which we seem barely to have emerged. Why doesn't the author plug a copy of Anna Karenina into a socket, and see if it can light up and do something useful besides give us unforgettable characters from another century and another nation?

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I majored in English Literature at Stanford and also studied at Oxford and I regret to say that an awful lot of what I read called to mind the quote of Samuel Johnson about Paradise Lost as "one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets.

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A nice pithy quote by SJ, but untrue. Beware of absolutes. I read one chapter of the twelve from PL each month for a year, and when I came to the end, I wished for a 13th, and maybe a 14th. More broadly to the conversation, a book such as Les Miserables or Brothers Karamazov can't help but impact your moral thinking, unless you are fully obtuse to how the story weaves a story that connects with contemporary human concerns. Classic literature is such because it is timeless in ability to speak to the human condition.

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How do we define "great" literature? I frequently read or hear a book referred to as "great literature," as in War and Peace, or "NOT great literature," as in the case of numerous best sellers. References to any articles addressing this question appreciated.

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I appreciate your effort to provoke thought and for us not to just sit in complacency over the value of reading literature, but I do think you overstate the case a bit. Part of the problem in finding the evidence one would need to support the claim for literature is that the claim is itself confused, and thus the search for evidence is so also. What sort of evidence are we looking for? I do not think anyone really would argue that any sort of reading of any sort of book would in itself transform us over some short amount of time. Not any sort of book... only books that complexly and imaginatively engage with social, moral, or psychological issues. Not any sort of reading... running one's eyes across a page or even grasping some concrete narrative of events wouldn't do. The reading required is the learning and engaging in thinking and imagining possibilities of action, character, and meaning. And, not over any short amount of time, but over a lifetime of such thinking and carrying it over to life.

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Obviously, the core of the argument here is that we don't know whether literature can enhance one's moral compass. But I sense an undertone of general skepticism toward the merits of literature beyond its "aesthetic rewards." It would have been interesting if the writer had been clearer on his position on that issue.

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OK, the author is a philosopher, so can we start with defining some basic terms? If the question is "Does Great Literature Make Us Better People?," then please define "literature," "great," "us," and "better people." It's clear in the article that the author takes the verb "to make" to mean a measurable causal link, but the other terms in the title question seem ill-defined. Many people read literature out of historical interest: does reading history make us better people? Does any knowledge about the world (in any domain) make the learner a better person? As other commenters have pointed out, these are old questions with long histories of their own--including many debates within philosophy itself. I'm surprised that the author, a philosopher, condemns any non-quantitative argument to be "nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment." Is it that easy to wipe away the entire history of philosophy up to the development of statistical research methods in the social sciences? Sure, there may not be any charts, graphs, or statistics in "Loves Knowledge" but at least Nussbaum takes some time to ponder, and then explicate, what she means by some of the crucial terms of her argument, and to

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connect her argument to other important philosophical positions in this area. With that alone, her proposals are more explicit and less "speculative" than any of the quantitative research programs outlined in this article.

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"Lady MacBeth did not faint," my teacher stated. In the scene the morning after the murder of the king, her guilty husband was talking too much, so she put on her act to shut him up, Dr. Cashman of Jamaica High explained. It was then I realized people in the pages of books (and from the hallucinations of authors, I later learned) were far more interesting and valuable to me than people on the bus. And only much later did I learn that super people like Lady Liberty (and, indeed, God) can come from hallucinations and be with us. And command. Wer kann sagen, er ist nicht hier?

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While anecdotal evidence is certainly not "scientific" and therefore easily suspect, I imagine there are many who find that their lives have been affected by reading widely, particularly in literature (and at times in philosophy!) I myself experienced a loving but provincial and relatively traditional upbringing that was suddenly blown open by high school classes in modern literature. Those books radically complicated the ways I perceived life -- and consequently morality -- and compelled me to begin to think outside the parameters I had inherited. Reading thus quite directly inflected my experience of life and relationship. Then, changing experiences fed back into my reading, further reading led to further re-evaluation of experience, new experiences and perceptions in turn continued to inflect my engagement with the texts I read ... and so on. The process continues. It doesn't guarantee anything about morality; the complex, varied, even contradictory perceptions literature can stage may be simply ignored or rejected by a mind determined to maintain it inherited preconceptions, for instance. But if one is open to the new possibilities of perception or feeling made available in much great writing and thinking, it at least is very possible that one becomes more cautious in judging, more tolerant, more "available" to a range of human communities and perceptions.

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The article wants empirical evidence that literature can make us "moral experts." But I see no attempt to identify what moral doctrine we're talking about. That makes for a very hand-wavy definition of morality. Few concepts are more subjective than morality, especially the vague form of it presented here. And so, there's a subtle contradiction at work in this article. How can one empirically/objectively evaluate something that is inherently subjective?

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continuation.

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The point about the sort of development connected with great literature is really an application of what we think is required for moral and personal development in general, i.e. that we develop morally by on the one hand learning to think complexly about what is important in our personal and social life, and by on the other hand, learning to imagine possibilities of life outside of our own experience and empathize with other people, perspectives, and forms of life. Reading is only one way to do this, but perhaps one of the important ways given how difficult this is in ordinary life. The evidence for these things is quite substantive in psychological research on pro-social and moral development and in clinical work.

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"...we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being." We do? Why? Reading literature is only worthwhile if there's some payoff? It would be good if it made us moral, for instance? (Thought that was religion's job... not that religion's results have been uniformly positive.) Or, cured baldness! Literature is a way of thinking, like algebra, a way of processing and understanding our experience, a way of exploring life and the world. You might say, literature is a capacity we have. Why not exercise this capacity--not to become better people but just because we are people?

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This is one of the stupidest columns I have ever seen. I just finished all eight volumes of Proustthird attempt in the course of a long lifetime, loved it this time around. I knowfeel and thinkI am a better human being for having done so. Along comes a social scientist (I have a doctorate in history), who demands what evidence I might have for this assertion. Really? What evidence might demonstrate "better human being"? Take your time on that one and get back to me. One of the reasons literature is good for us is that it expands the range of our human experience, knowledge, sensibilities, etc. OK, did Proust do that for me? You bet. Evidence? You can take my word for it. Please.

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you were a a "better" person already before you started! but perhaps you now have much more patience.

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In other words, you don't have any evidence (other than a display of smug superiority.)

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This is a reply to RS - what makes GEM's post seem "smug?" The mere fact that he/she has read all of Proust, and you haven't? I haven't read all of Proust, but I don't feel the post is smug. We readily accept that if someone expends a great deal of effort and thought to other areas of life, those might be enriching to someone. Would it be smug for someone to say that learning to paint has enriched their life and perception? That playing a musical instrument has? Gardening? Meditating? Writing? Why is it that someone saying, hey, reading this difficult work has enriched me, is smug? Why is assuming that one knows more about science, if one has spend one's life studying it, not considered "smug", but assuming that one might know more about literature and what it expresses, when one has spent a great deal of time on that, considered "smug"? I really don't get it, although I've been treated like a snob by my extended family for years, simply because I read a lot and use words around them that they don't know (inadvertently, as I've tried to reduce my vocabulary around them since I was a teenager, in order to avoid this recurring and awful situation). My science-y brother, of course, is not a snob, though we have the same amount of education and similar personalities. It's just a literature thing, I guess.

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"Thats one reason we deplore the dumbing -down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture." 1) The Great Gatsby @250 wpm - http://youtu.be/l-Fwg9f0aFk 2) [BBC] Why Reading Matters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdwFFFBCPzw&feature=share& list=PL...

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You are so wrong, Gregory Currie.

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Aspirin and codeine make us better when we have migraines. great books enter us, like the pills, enter for years later, in ways too subtle and complex to discuss in a newspaper article. We measure reality against them, ourselves against our heroes of the books or the moment's grasp, our love against theirs, our sense of humanity against the author's -- as week answers to life's ills and pressures. . Shakespeare, Harold Bloom believes, and Cervantes re-made thinking about people and their dreams and feelings (I do an injustice poetically digesting the arguments of Bloom). So long as I have a mind, books and theatre and art and poetry are voices that guide, deter, modify, and, sadly, review my every day. Admission: I taught university English, Comparative lit., and even a little Classics. Classrooms never worked perfectly -- I have the papers I graded, a million pages in 40 years, as proof. But the books resonate in my students and

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in me. If the same failed for Nazis, don't blame the books, blame the teachers and readers and societies. The Germans do.

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Only somewhat relevant, and perhaps even obvious, is that "reading fiction improves your understanding of social relationshipsyour thinking about what other people are thinking." [From "Such Stuff as Dreams, the Psychology of Fiction", by Keith Oatley] Though hard to prove scientifically, I think it's pretty clear that reading good literature helps us become better people.

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Does Great Literature Make Us Better? prably not, but it don't hurt us none neither.

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I am holding my head at the premise of this fluffer-nutty piece. Does lit fic make us better people? Well, when you come up with a demonstrable test for what "better people" means, please apply it to literary fiction readers, and then get back to me. Personally, I second the conclusion reached by Joan Didion, who noted once that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live."

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As I grow older, I am amazed at how little I know.. I don't know how to prove what is self-evident or anything else. I think of Kurt Gdel's incompleteness theorem has the effect of demonstrating that we can't "prove" anything. I've come to think (with Richard Rohr) that our need for certitude has been our biggest mistake. Our need to be certain prevents schools and universities from dealing with is not easily measurable thus contributing to trivia being school and university content. I now think we would all be better off by accepting the little each of us knows unless an individual or group is harmed. Warm and kind regards to everyone.

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Yes, Great literature does make you a better person. I stared reading books like Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, War and Peace, Emma, Persuasion, and many more when I was 12 or 13 years old. Because of the quality of the writing these books made me see the world as it really was and I understood it. I wanted to read these books more than a bestseller. There is nothing wrong with a bestseller, but I prefer the classics. Their truths are timeless and their stories universal. Eugenia Renskoff

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Great Literature makes one a better person? I believe the question is poorly phrased. There are historically great villains who have read the above,

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and gone on to commit some memorable evil deeds, engendering popular reads throughout the centuries on the above. Having started at 13 at a convent school with Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Eugnie Grandet, The Princess of Clves and a few others, I certainly found these highly interesting, somewhat splendid and ultimately oppressive. However, I lightened up when I received a copy of 'Gone With The Wind', from a parent at the time which I found redressing, and it placed a ray of hope in my young eyes. It was a friend who had spent some time at Oxford who was to introduce me to the English classics in my 30s and I have a marked preference for these. The Greats and Popular reads? Both. Some of the latter are equally timeless and universal. A Bestseller at the moment? Possibly, Anthony Trollope's: "The Way We Live Now", or "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen. Enjoyed both in different ways and If I could write either, I would be a happy camper. Best regards. Merry Ley

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I'm twenty- one years of age, and major in literature at university. I liken the questions Professor Currie poses to the course assessments handed to students at the conclusion of each semester. I dread these handouts, and like my peers, seldom take them seriously. Pencil in hand, I struggle to fit the breadth and nuance of the semester into the tidy, bureaucratic grading bubbles: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much have you learned in this course? I hesitate to answer these questions, because they seem so contrary to the ideas at the heart of literary discourse. In the classroom we are taught to do re workrethink, reconsider, reweigh, retraceessentially, go back to the beginning and start all over again. Do I think any differently about temptations of the flesh now that I have read Faust? Probably not. Am I more equipped to resist material pleasures in my own life? No. I am as confused and conflicted as ever before. So, did you learn anything at all then this semester? my father will ask confusedly, as I eagerly summarzie the semester. If he had given me a bubble sheet, quite frankly, I would have answered no. Because that bubble sheets conception of learning, as measured by numbers, statisticsquantitative, inert objective tools of measurement cannot adequately capture the visceral, pulsating, exhilarating feeling of being alive, as great writers so oft capture.

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The amount you have learned in a course may not become evident for years. Ask yourself now about the courses you took last year "did I learn a lot or enough in those courses?" Some courses are just place holders for the next course. Ultimately, courses in college are preparing you for employment during the your life. We should all receive course evaluations on our deathbeds perhaps?

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The question implied is that great literature makes us better in terms of morality. But how does one get better at morality? Isnt morality intrinsic? In terms of morality, such work (classics) forces us to consider dilemmas that, perhaps at our most pressing, we might also have to face (or in approximation). But this is an is not about moral instruction. You can gain the same from reading a well written memoir about drug addiction, for example. Is it morally salubrious, per se? One benefit perhaps of reading the classics is that it allows us to focus on something other than our usual media fed diet. We are in the time we are in. It is a moot point to lament the technological avalanche that prevents us from seeing the forest through the trees. There are books written today that will be the classics tomorrow--that is unavoidable. These will be read in some future period with likely the same moral certitude. Questions of morality are irrelevant mostly because the people who read these works in the first place probably dont need the moral instruction--or whatever the author is trying to suggest would be the moral gain--from such reading. For those that do need the example, perhaps theyre reading those books because everyone else is. Great to have this provocative forum, thanks NYT. http://robertmdetman.blogspot.com/

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I am now in the last fifth of my life and cannot recall a time when I did not read copiously. Yet I have never read Proust, Tolstoy or Goethe (I wouldn't even know the latter if not for several great operas and hundreds of even greater lieder his work inspired), and feel none the worse for it. Oh, I have read some James, Poe, Hawthorne, etc., but not to evolve a moral compass of any kind, just as entertainment. Still, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are even more entertaining (with their own mores to impart). I've taken three cracks at MOBY DICK over 60 years and have just given up. I'm more from a Movie Era. Assuming a film is a good representation of its source material with inclusions of its moral teachings, I really do believe that I have gotten just as much (remember, only MORALLY speaking) out of the March-Laughton 1935 LES MISERABLES or Laughton's 1939 HUNCHBACK OF NOTE DAME than out of the Hugo novels they are based on (and which I DID read, once each; once was enough!), and that one - especially a kid - can get a lot of truly worthwhile morality out of Laurel and Hardy, CASABLANCA and STAR WARS, etc. without much recourse to some of the greatest works of literature. After all, it isn't the literature, stupid, it's the morality! Anyway, if one reads Shakespeare incessantly, one can get more morality from his output than from all the great works of literature, movies, mysteries, etc. COMBINED. So, brush up your Shakespeare (originally learned from KISS ME KATE!).

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Literature doesn't teach me morals. It does, however, teach me how people think, remember, and invent. Those are worthy things to know about.

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What a bore this article was. All speculation on the main topic. I was hoping for some data, but no, just opining around tangentially related data. Total disappointment and not even interesting.

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Agreed. About halfway through I thought "has this really not gotten anywhere yet?" Maybe the author should read some more literature and strive to improve his narrative.

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In the paragraph in Melville's "Pierre, or the Ambiguities" introducing "Chronometricals and Horologicals," the narrator suggests, in the terms of the present column, that reading literature doesn't necessarily improve moral decisions or behavior but instead restates the problems more excellently--and that such restatement may be the closest we can get to solving our most fundamental human problems: "For to me it seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solutions), therefore it may help to the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be wholly without use. At the worst, each person can now skip, or read and rail for himself." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Maybe a more interesting course of inquiry would be to examine the effect of popular fiction on the morals and characters of those readers. Not all of us pick up Anna Karenina for a bit of light reading, but thousands of us read Michael Connelly, Jo Nesbo and Jodi Picoult.

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Let me offer a perspective that might be a middle ground. On the one hand, WRITING WELL and BEING GOOD need not go together and often don't. Likewise, people who do some very bad things can love literature & art. I don't need an extensive data set to see that the correlation between morality and reading is imperfect, but that does not mean it is zero. I can also agree with the comments about data-collection and eduction. The Provost at my university once commented that "assessment" is important because "numbers don't lie", to which I wish I had replied, "Having BAD data is far worse than NO data because both leave you ignorant, but when you have bad data, you don't know that you're ignorant".

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On the other hand, I do not agree with those who seem to condemn Gregory Currie merely for suggesting that the effects of reading literature might be measurable, rather than merely assumed. Scientific psychology tries to measure many things that at first glance appear to be unmeasurable. Sometimes it fails, but often it succeeds. Our goal in psychology is to understand the mind using scientific methods, and one area of mental life that has received less attention than it should is the effect of literature on the reader. I think that it is a legitimate and fascinating topic for better research. Why do people read great books, and in what ways does that reading change them? However, that does not mean you need to wait for a psychologist's blessing before you start reading a good book!

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A quick survey of the comments to Professor Curries piece unfortunately confirm his point: those who insist on literature being morally edifying appear to think this requires no arguments or demonstrations, only an appeal to vague intuitions. One may not care for his thesis but platitudinous quotes of the sort used on bookmarks and coffee mugs wont serve as counter arguments.

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Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Empathy is time and time again proven to be have a correlation with comprehension -- the more you understand someone, the more familiar you become with them, the more human they appear. Literature places you in the shoes of thousands upon thousands of people, and good literature allows you to really feel what life can be like through the lens of another, allowing you in turn to better appreciate the hardships of others. Consider how Hugo's Miserables has opened up the plight of the poor to the rest of the world, further refined by Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. These books shifted public view on the poor from vermin that should be moved out of sight to human beings who need to be rehabilitated. Good literature does not inherently make you a better person. What it does make you is more aware of your limitations and preconceptions, touching on universal elements of humanity and giving you the opportunity understand the previously alien thoughts and actions of another. What you do with that opportunity is up to you.

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Yes, well said. In the words of C.S. Lewis: Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

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Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (An Experiment In Criticism)

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I wish the argument here were better. The question is well worth asking. It used to be the case, of course, that the reading of literature was viewed as decadent. I believe there is some merit to the argument (a point made by Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and W James that the author doesn't mention, oddly). There is a kind of smugness even in many of these comments. It's fiction, folks. Can you be sure that you aren't fooling yourself into thinking that you know more and do more of value simply by having read lots of made-up stories? James noted that a woman who weeps leaving the theater may not notice the beggar at her feet. The question demands more thoughtful consideration than it gets here.

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"...literature can make moral experts of us." What is a "moral expert"? There is no such thing. One reads either because the reading is an assignment of some sort, or because one enjoys reading. The two undisputed advantages of reading are: 1) reading broadens one's vocabulary; and 2) reading strengthens one's capacity for intellectual application and analysis. If we wanted students to be more willing readers, our schools might assign them books that are more suited to their tastes. My son was assigned an Amy Tan novel in high school; girl literature! Why not assign a robust Western novel, such as A.B. Guthrie's "The Big Sky," which is not long, has lots of guytype action, and also carries a moral message? How about Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake"? How about Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" or "The Sirens of Titan"? Why not give the class a choice of two books, and the class can discuss the books in groups? Very long books, and girl-type literature, are all too common in our schools, and are a big reason many students dislike literature. I am an avid reader, I read "Anna Karenina" many years ago and enjoyed it, but "War and Peace" made my eyes glaze over; I could not get past 75 pages. The best edition of Shakespeare I ever found was an edition of "The Merchant of Venice" that had the translations in tiny letters under the text, removing the necessity to keep referring to the notes on the bottom of the page; I cannot find it again. I read it and loved it when I was 13.

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Oh, I knew when I wrote this I was omitting the most obvious, obvious one of all: Don Quixote!!!!!! Obviously this is a discourse on the effects of reading courtly romances and trying to enact their messages. Ostensibly Cervantes is presenting Quixote as a deluded fool, but we're all captive to the fantasies we have about ourselves, whether we're on the side of empiricism, science, and windmills (implicitly the author of this article), or tilt at them. I

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admit I don't know Candide so well, but the famous conclusion -- world-weary but not hopeless because even with disillusionment one can still act and try to improve things, commit to a worthy, realistic cause-- "we must cultivate our garden" seems to match Cervantes: recognize illusion probably plays a role in all experience and endeavor, and do your best understanding that.

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We can beat around the bush, trying to justify art and great novels. But lets cut the chase. Simply asking the question about "evidence," I suggest, pretty much precludes understanding what art is about. Art is not about results. Art, and great art that is, is not subject to polls or the experimenter's workbench. And, neither is life. What is the "evidence" that claims a life was worth living, that an endeavor was worthwhile, that even descendants and children are particularly unique and valuable among 10 trillion, that a certain life of an individual --famous or not-- was in fact no more than a failure, or at best inconsequential and of null value? If we think we can quantify in those terms, some might find that the entire soul-searching of philosophers has been a waste... And, it so comes to scientists: many a radical, of which there have been many, will gladly burn a scientist or explode him and any intellectuals to boot to smithereens in a terrorist plot, and this applies to politicians too (of which, many more would point out that the evidence confirms their lack of worth!) Simply, art needs no justification --and neither does life. It just exists in exhilarating diversity and greatness, and cannot be constrained nor will it stand still to be weighed, and laughs (and weeps) at the same time, in Bacchanalian frenzy, when somebody asks what is it for, what it is good for, and how much it costs.

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Great literature make us better citizens?I am doubtful because science proves we have no free will,we cannot know our selves because we are full of hidden inner drives and so we are all different.,universal morality is immoral.Question arise why people read great literature?Simple answer to understand himself I read great literature.Great literature enhance our consciousness and we forget our misery,disappointment ,literature give us joy pleasure , we forget surrounding and emerge and intimate fully with characters of novels.I think this is sufficient gift from literature. What writers of great literature get for his writing I think he is getting same reward what readers got.

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rameshraghuvanshi, Even if science proves that have no free will which it had not and never will your reading a book of literature changes your imputs so it may change your outputs.

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I asked a colleague the question of whether great literature makes us morally better. Both she and I agree that, for the most part, one doesn't go to literature to become morally better. Great literature can help one think through complex situations, test one's aesthetic judgement and critical faculties, and certainly does often raise important moral questions. However, it seems to me that all this is fodder for an a priori moral sensibility to use, material on which it works to, hopefully, become more refined. I don't think it necessarily acts as a building block for that sensibility.

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All great art (and, even some of the lesser variety) has the capacity to expand us spiritually and, often it occurs unconsciously or subconsciously. The vulgar can exert an opposite effect.

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I am a high school English teacher of at-risk kids who mostly come from Baltimore. English teachers have been driven into an uproar over the Common Core standards and their emphasis on informational rather than literary texts, so articles like this feel relevant to me for justifying a large part of what I teach: literary fiction. I don't know if the great books make one, morally, a better person. I think that's an unnecessary limiting question when considering if and how we benefit from reading literature. Given the students I teach--kids who have MAYBE left inner-city Baltimore a handful of times by the time they're in high school--I view the purpose of literature as primarily a means to encounter and "make real" experiences that my students never get a chance to have otherwise. These are kids who often see a forest or a mountain for the first time on a field trip with our school. I hope that their recognition that there is a world beyond the neighborhood they rarely get to leave will help them understand that there are options. I am hoping to spark their curiosity. I am hoping that they will connect with the struggles of the characters we read about and take inspiration or find hope in that.

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At the least, exposure to moral complexities of intricate situations, and implications of one or another course of action in a given situation, makes it harder to plead ignorance when behaving like a Levin (was that his name?) in an analogous situation. Even if it doesn't improve behavior in a particular situation, literary exposure surely effects the expectations we may hold the Tolstoy reader to, since he knows what irresponsible "romantic" behavior might do. Incidentally, this question itself preoccupied many - perhaps most- of the literary greats of the past: Hamlet's "play within the play" , several of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and two residents of Dante's Inferno are involved or implicated in these issues.

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There is plenty of evidence abound that we are now in an age that refuses to recognize the value of anything without empirical evidence. We live in the age of great doubt, and thus the growing insistent queries into human happiness (or lack of). This article is yet another proof of how far we have gone from the innate ability for human intelligence (in all its forms) to grasp complex truths, to its now compulsive need to simplify understanding through empirical evidence/scientific methodologies/quantifying available (limited) data, etc. The question is not if great literature improves us as human beings, but whether great literature (or any work of art) addresses the needs of the soul. Since there is no map of the human soul, this article is solid evidence of the mistake one makes in imposing a stultifying methodology to dissect the human spirit.

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Great literature expands our understanding of human actions and lives. I can read the facts about what happened in World War I, but my understanding of the human effects of the war are immeasurably heightened by reading "All Quiet on the Western Front," or "A Soldier in the Great War." You can say this about almost any great novel, whether it deals with a historical figure or event, such as "All the King's Men," or simply illuminates a time and place, as in "Emma" or "Sense & Sensibility." It's not that we can't understand events or times or people without great literature, but our view of the world would be greatly diminished.

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George Steiner once asked the question, which you touch on in the above: How could the Nazis slaughter people in the morning and play Schuberts String Quintet in the afternoon? I dont think this enquiry disproves much of anything, and I would say that, in the case of the Nazis, the implied conclusion is a non sequitur; here, the two are non-overlapping magisteria. To the Nazis, non-Aryans were a stain upon such art, even if, however paradoxically, produced by them. The very notion that sub-humanity could revel in this glorification of the human spirit was predictably repugnant to their minds. The truth is, only a fraction of persons, in their heart of hearts, accept multicultural pluralism. Most people identify very narrowly (far from the highfalutin "I belong to humanity"), and their toleration, especially in times of duress, is very limited; and they fervidly wish to convert others to their line of thinking, their way of life. Or exterminate them. I understand that whats good for me is not necessarily good for thee, but I will give no quarter to postmodernistic mumbo-jumbo that equates the scribbling of a lunatic with the majesty of the Mona Lisa. And I dont like John Galt. And I dont want utilitarianism. I want people to read. Read, people:

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http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/search/edwardhopper/1#supersizedsearch-235569

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Listening to classical music or looking at great works of art does not have the power to make us better people. Literature, I believe, does. BUT, it depends on what you read. Not every book will lead you to question tour world, will help you to walk in other's footsteps. Remember the Nazis banned a lot of books, too, and not just ones by Jewish authors, but ones that might make people think and question their monstrous ideology.

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David L hits it on the head when he quotes John Steiner... How can the Nazis enjoy lofty Schubert at night, and burn fellow human beings in the morning? The answer is *easily*. How many great slaveholders built beautiful antebellum homes in the evening, but terrorized their slaves in the morning? How many great captains of industry engaged in building great corporations under the exploitation of child labor? How many great politicians wrote memoirs, in turn stirring or stultefying, while killing thousands of civilians? How many great scientists have run experiements full of tremendous saddism? How about the visionary engineering of German rocketeers that made Apollo a reality, which got started in bombing London? How could Hitler love his dogs so much? How can we love our dogs so much while gladly shopping meat that comes from the truly horrific industrial torture of cattle? The answer indeed is easily! The question is not whether Art, or Science, makes us better... The riddle is, how can humanity shine so brightly and pure, while at the same time engage in terrible acts of cruelty. Can something be done about it? Perhaps art can make us better and is making us better, maybe not. However, it is clear that Science does not make us better, as science has only amplified the horrors of war. There is no "evidence" for science either... yet that does not make science worthless, and for the same reason, art is also not worthless.

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"Great" literature is art. Art saves lives. [How this works has untold methods.]

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"Many who enjoy the hard-won pleasures of literature are not content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well. And thats just what we dont know yet." Really, this was all he needed to write. Everything else was filler.

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I am so tired of being told that I don't know anything but scientists do. The old adage, "know thyself" is now deemed a myth. Only scientists know me, and of course, they are not people, so it is possible for them. I have a new meaning for DNA- Do Not Agree

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Or perhaps great literature is part of the indoctrination process that helps us feel ok for our immoral behaviors? The elephant is the definition of "moral."

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For anyone interested in a superb novella about this very topic, may I suggest '"The Uncommon Reader" by renowned playwright and author Allan Bennett. It's a lovely and humorous exploration of how a course of reading great books influences the Queen of England. Of course, it falls unabashedly into the "literature makes one a better person" camp, and, being fiction, offers no research to back its uplifting message. Enjoy!

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If you want to know whether great literature makes us better, look no further than the Bible. It is among the world's greatest literary fiction. Some people are improved by reading it; some use it to justify cruelty.

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The civil rights revolution in the 1940's through the '60's required a dramatic change in the thoughts and values of American whites. It's hard to imagine that books such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" did not contribute to that noble purpose.

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I have no idea whether or not literature has a lasting moral value, but telling stories seems to be fundamental to being human. Even if 'literature' disappeared, we would still tell stories to each other and to ourselves. Gossip is a form of story telling. As the poet Muriel Rukeyser says in a poem: "The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms." --from "The Speed of Darkness"

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It would be nice if "Scientists and their Ilk" would explain how atoms tell stories and laugh and cry at stories.

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with a few exceptions, fiction has had almost no effects, and is not particularly good for anyone, in my opinion. i guess there was a suicide fad after goethe's 'werther', so that's an effect. if you aren't personally entertained, absorbed, or edified by it, there really is not point. same with philosophy,

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actually. i think rationalizing your enjoyments as world-changing wonders is a bit absurd. really, people are all like, 'poetry transforms the world' and stuff. aww let's not be silly.

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Hmm, Crispin - not sure about the validity of your thesis: Alexander the Great was inspired by the Iliad to conquer Asia Julius Caesar was inspired by Alexander to conquer Gaul and rule Rome many a novel has inspired someone to lead a life they never even knew existed...

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Crispin, I would add to the list of books which had an enormous influence in their day: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Einstein said, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." Great literature gives us that, no doubt!

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Interesting thoughts; Hmmm, I wonder if the author has read some of the very books he derides in his piece as having an impact on an individual's thinking? I haven't read too many op-eds in this newspaper, or any other for that matter, written by someone who confines his/her reading to 'how-to-fix-it' books and the like.

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Nussbaum flunked a big test: she railed against Nietzsche as a nonserious writer, offering nothing but cliches drawn from a hodge-podge of sources. If she thinks literature ennobles, I'm sure she is making a twisted, i.e. ideological pseudo-argument. Of course my being "sure" is also ideological--but in matters of literature, that's all there is.

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But Nietzsche did steal most of his thoughts... and why he was ever taken seriously is still a puzzlement to me.

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Reading great books is either an enormous pleasure or a chore, depending on the book. Approaching a great book as a form of moral enlightenment is likely to increase the latter tendency, and decrease the former. Despite Professor Curries protest to the contrary, I get the rather squeamish feeling that if a study were done on this subject, we would find that people who read literature are in fact better educated, earn more, and commit fewer crimes than people who dont read these books. I hope this isnt true, but it does seem likely.

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Are these virtues achieved by reading literature? Probably not; it is more likely that being well educated, free from the demands of poverty, and not inclined to a life of crime, might increase the odds that one would have the time and energy to read literature. If one had to supply reasons for reading, they would likely fall along the following lines. Literature enhances: Our verbal skills Our ability to engage in abstract reasoning And helps save us from the mortal sin of parochialism This is not to deny the moral virtues of some great authors and books. It is merely that a desire to grow in moral virtue is only one of many reasons to read. Another reason, perhaps, is that literature helps us to better understand ourselves.

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You freely choose what you actions you take. Great Literature does not make you better or worse unless you want it to.

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"Great" or not, I expect that anyone who has read the story of Monseigneur Bienvenu (Bishop Myriel) in Les Miserables, will not forget it or him. He's the guy who leads Jean Valjean down the virtuous path, practically dragging him at one point. A profoundly moral man, he could be quite an influence on a reader who is looking for a lesson or two.

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"Great literature" is almost by definition that work of genius, and that is worth studying. Period.

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It's impossible to predict how anyone will interpret "challenging works of literature." To suggest that they will make the reader a better person is to have never read important literature carefully and with an open mind.

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While you can read literature on your own for pleasure and many other reasons, my real question is why do we force our children to read "great literature" and claim it is superior to reading other things, in the course of their education?? The education establishment proposes all types of thesis for this proposition, from it teaches us to think to it teaches us morality. But I still ask, does my kid get more from Harry Potter or Catcher in the Rye??

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I think that the education establishment should stop formulating education based on the prejudices of entrenched educators and put some science behind what they are teaching. After all, I want my kid to get the best education possible and it is my tax dollars they are wasting if they are wrong.

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"does my kid get more from Harry Potter or Catcher in the Rye?" Your kid gets practice decoding individual letters into great stories, with both. And Junior can read one, then the other. And then reams and reams more stories after that.

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Kids should read books that naturally interest them and that manage to expand their boundaries.

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I agree with the comments about the futility of trying to measure, in any useful fashion, whether reading "literature" makes us anything other than people who have read literature. I thought the real question was why read fiction, when real life is all around us? I don't need to read Cold Mountain to learn about the Civil War (I did though, which is why I say this). There are thousands of memoirs, diaries and letters which can be written if one wants to understand the lives of those (both soldier and civilian) who lived through it. Not to mention hundreds of first-rate histories, where the authors have read the memoirs, diaries, etc. and condensed it into a coherent story line for the reader. Why would I waste 1 second of my time reading about people who never lived, never spoke, and whose "adventures" come out of the mind of someone living 150 years after the fact? If you wish to know and understand the world you live in, then live in it! Read the works of scientists, musicians, philosophers, educators, politicians, etc. When the non-fiction works in the library have been exhausted, maybe I'll send a minute or two on make-believe. Maybe.

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Reading fiction changes our definition of make-believe. Maybe.

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The experience of good literature, is the experience of vivid, complex, memorable dreaming. Vivid dreaming is a way to explore experience from a safe distance. Does vivid dreaming civilize the dreamer? Does a voracious reader who lives a normal lifespan become more experienced than another who lives a comparable span of years but who does not read? Which of these two persons would you rather be? I predict a statistically valid report on the personal and the social benefits accruing from reading literature won't change your answer to the last question.

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Excellent post, but I wish that you also had mentioned the great, late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who examined democratic, empathic power of the novel, in a number of essays and books.

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Using the term literature in this context can be misleading. It implies that there is some sort of imprimatur imposed by the quality of the work on the benefits accrued to its readers. The quality of a piece of literature may or may not improve the reception of any "message" it might contain. In fact, try getting an author to discuss the message of a work, and you will most likely get evasive responses. Narrative is a better term to use in discussing the benefits provided to society by literature, not least because it encompasses a wider range of types and styles. Research has shown, as hinted in Mr. Currie's piece, that narrative has a role in promoting positive social values. Story telling seems to be embedded deeply in human nature, and its roots likely predate modern humans, as archaeology has shown repeatedly. Research has shown that stories almost always present the characters displaying selflessness and altruism in a positive light while those who are self serving are portrayed more negatively. Heroes win and villains lose, which promotes the virtues of compassion and concern for others which is the glue that creates social cohesion. Narrative works regardless of the sophistication of the presentation. The quality of literature is like the quality of wine: it certainly holds appeal to those with a refined palate, but it isnt necessary to get you d runk.

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This is essentially a straw-man argument. It debunks a false assumption that literature is valued only as moral edification. This assumption is based in a shoddy instrumentalism that is obviously easily vulnerable to an instrumentalist critique. This is somewhat like assuming that children are valued primarily for their potential as workers, and then complaining that there is no data to support the enhanced productivity of adults raised as child labourers. Now that's moralistic and not very precise as an analogy, which is precisely the problem in the article. Here's a better analogy: it's like assuming that music is only popular because it trains the ear to identify tones heard in nature and industry. But is there statistical evidence that listening to Miles Davis makes you more attuned to traffic sounds, and therefore a better driver? A more attentive parent? Can music set a nut to a bolt? Does it raise the GDP? Does it earn its keep? Are there no prisons, no workhouses? See, what I did there was to use a line from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" to connect with readers who will recognize the suggestion that the author has a rather Scrooge-like attitude toward literature. The allusion picks up on the analogy with child labourers: literature that's expected to have a

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practical payoff in moral edification is like children who are expected to work for their keep. As though there were no other register of value. As though we were not already a world of orphans.

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Wonderfully stated, thank you.

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Good topic for discussion; it has been on my mind for long time - Avid reader since H.S. I would have made a major distinguish as others of said of "Moral Expertise" or "Future Analyst" and Wisdom taken from story telling which is older than Ra of Egypt. If our children are not reading "Great" Literature" it is because we are NOT creating good stories. As seen by myopic Hollywood, as matter of fact HBO has done better. And until my adapted nation makes movies touching on real 21st Century issues we will get another Greek Deity movie and more overpaid Actors. Where is the story of Fanny Lou Hammer? Where are movies showing the irony of "Moral Expertise" gone bad like our Priests. But they can make a re-make of Red Dawn, please. But those folks know the Visual is important today in our age of Google eyes.

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I cannot imagine life without great literature and poetry and beautiful works of art. They so viscerally and immediately affect my mood, my thoughts and hopes and dreams. To hit that deep that quickly is profound. It sounds nave, and I'm not, I've been on this rock many decade. But beautifully written words, compelling story lines, tiny specks of paint creating a day at the park -life without such images would make me question humanity far more than I already do. Try to create something that captures the attention of so many others and begin to understand its value. In fact, it is in those works where I come closer to being willing to consider that there may be a God or a greater being because the message, the image, it is so hard to think of it coming into creation solely through the artists' faculties. Trying to write or paint something that stands the test of time tells me artists possess an incredulous gift, and I will draw from it whenever and wherever I can. Great literature like any great writing and art awakens my soul in the best of ways. As it does my granddaughter. How does that happen? Life without such works, for me, would be cloudy and gray every day.

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An article that raises an interesting question but lays out the territory of the argument in all the unproductive ways. It looks like an article about 'why literature?' but really implicitly conflates that question (at least insofar as the lay reader would read it) with 'what is the value of literature?', then makes the assumption that value is largely equivalent to moral edification. On top of that, moral edification is assumed to be something that is quantitatively measurable along a simple axis of 'better-worse'. The possibility that this might not be the

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case is dismissed in one paragraph by a fallacious appeal to the scientific models of evidence that prevail in contemporary culture, but which are precisely what humanistic study is able to put under critique. So, predictably, a scientific investigation of a humanistic question yields the conclusion that scientific investigations do not make much useful headway in humanistic questions. This is, of course, a perfectly valid if obvious conclusion. But the problem is the implicit dismissal of other approaches. Because contemporary elite culture equates what is scientific with what is true (all while relying on unexamined philosophical assumptions about 'truth'), the failure of scientific investigation is taken as the impossibility or unavailability of 'useful truth' in a field. This kind of thing is, frankly, what increasingly turns the inquiring scientific mind into popular dogma.

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Great literature will work (to improve complex, ethical decision-making) in whom it works; it will not work in whom it does not (or will not) work. The impact 'good literature' would theoretically have would not even be stable in a single subject-- as it would depend on the stage/place/time in life the books were encountered. Nice to ponder on a quiet, rainy day...and good for generating more questions than answers.

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To me the most convincing argument comes from Steven Pinker in "The Better Angels of our Nature," wherein he theorizies that the documented decline of violence in the world began with the introduction of lierature in the form of the novel. This, he suggests, fostered a rise in empathy in the population as a whole. What greater good from literature could one hope to achieve? On the other hand, there may not be a clear argument that "great' literature has a more profound effect on violence in the world than "cheap" literature. Maybe it isn't what one reads, just the fact that one reads at all, that makes the world a better place.

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Hmmm... Violence has decreased since the introduction of "literature in the form of the novel? I must have missed the class where the Holocaust, the Gulag, Pol Pot, the destruction of the indigenous people of the Americas not to mention (fill in the blanks) didn't count as "violence".

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Literature makes us smarter by conveying meaning in open, indirect ways that require interpretation and invite discussion. Also, literature helps us better understand the culture and history of a specific time and place.

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So do many TV shows. People are smart and people like to discuss complex social and moral issues ( ever really listened to the content of watercooler talk?). People are interested to learn about other people's and places, hence the popularity of travel documentaries and "The Great Race". "Literature" has no monopoly on "making us smarter" -- whatever that means.

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This is a fascinating piece. Thank you for taking on a difficult and vital topic. I have been a devoted reader all my life. When young, I was exposed to all kinds of great books in which attractive characters wrestled with moral dilemmas and learned valuable lessons about themselves and the world. Forty years later, I can quote long passages from these books. I enjoyed all these books and feel grateful that I found them (or had them pressed on me by teachers and librarians). But were they formative? Did they shape my character? Sadly, I fear not. Again and again in my twenties, I hurt other people, broke rules, shaded the truth, failed to pay my debts and did other things that appall me now. The books and their lessons were nice and I'm glad I read them, but in the crucial moments of moral decision, I turned my back on these exemplars and did what I wanted to do. The best I can say for myself is that I still feel guilty about my selfish decisions.

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Storytelling is a way of collecting truthful bits of information and presenting them in a way the human mind retains. The story is a tool, and the art of telling a story is a useful skill all people should learn. A story is not moral, and should never be believed. Fiction has the most value when it is weighing the value of ones personal experience with that of another. I prefer science and math because it is all about the kernel of truth wrap in the complex volume of skill required to understand the simplicity of why it works. The story is best when it is revisited armed with new insight.

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There is tangible value in literature but it has nothing to do with the elevation of the soul - that visceral response to art is innate and no amount of cultural acclimation can inspire it - there are people who melt at the sight of great art, who are moved by a great story and who are stirred by incredible music but the fact is this vanilla appreciation is as Veblen so rightly said a sign of conspicuous leisure - there are very few jobs that require a knowledge of literature but almost all polite society has a literary cannon or in our generation a twitterary pistol to unite its constituents. Ignore it and risk being ignored.

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People who think that literature improves ethics or morals should spend a few semesters in any English department.

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Reading great literature can be a deeply moving, intellectually stimulating, even fun experience. In that way it is like all the arts, and even like fine food or wine. And as with those things, the more time we spend with higher quality materials, the more refined our taste (might) become, which in turn means that we can have richer, subtler aesthetic experiences. But I know plenty of jerks and bullies who are highly cultured--and in fact use their deep knowledge of literature and the arts as weapons.

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The second paragraph does not substantiate the argument in the first paragraph.

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I presume that liberals are better read than conservatives, in general. But the former seem not to have noticed that perhaps our widespread use of abortion is no more moral than Obama's use of drones as political strategy. When issues like "women's rights" or "the need to defend America" come up, our moral sense goes out the window and we act on Hume's dictum that reason is the slave of passions. While I do value literature, I would certainly put the ten commandments, or the five precepts of the Buddha or even Aesop's fables above Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover. Not that the latter should not be read, and they may well make us more sophisticated as people. But "more sophisticated" is not the same as "more moral."

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Parse the commandments and you will find five of them are specific to a particular religion (thou shalt have no other gods before me; remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy) and others are vague (there's been a lot of argument over what constitutes 'killing', whether there is such a thing as justifiable homicide, the 'just war', etc.; and is 'bearing false witness' limited to such situations as testifying under oath, or does it also encompass 'no, you don't look fat in those jeans'?). People who recommend the Ten Commandments as an infallible ethical resource either haven't read them lately or haven't given them much thought, or both.

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As an atheist leftist, I could not agree with you more.

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A Dr. Seuss book can have more moral impact than War and Peace. Does this qualify it as literary fiction? I don't ask this cynically or ironically. I ask it seriously, and the search for a philosophical answer might bring us closer to the original question.

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Reading almost anything of some note, helps us become better informed. Sad that so few ever pick up a book. Then there are those like myself who read books constantly. Some in pursuit of unanswered questions I have. I am a confirmed Realist so more often than not I try and be constructive about authors opinions of facts. Fiction is fun as it takes me away, or to places and times I would have enjoyed.

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My feeling, based on my own experience, is that there is a tremendous difference between simply reading a work of literature and then putting it down (what we generally do as adults), and reading literature and discussing it at length in a group setting as we progress through the book and after we're finished (what we did as students). Reading fiction alone gets us entertainment. Reading plus analysis and debate can help us "refine our moral and social sensibilities."

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Exactly. But I have always been against the use of literature to "teach values." Readers and teachers in classroom discussions and through essay work and critiquing discover in works of literature a range of ethical issues, and, greatly to their enhanced sophistication, learn to lean away from black-andwhite views on matters of right and wrong.

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I object to the question itself. Asking whether literature "earns its keep" is a vulgar and unfortunate cultural manifestation that seems to dominate just now. It crops up in many places like whether a liberal education "pays off" in the job market. An other example is the question of whether access to health care for the poor/uninsured saves money in the long run. Since when can we only justify actions when they lead to some explicit profit? What happened to doing things that are either: a) enjoyable; b) make you an informed citizen; c) because it's the right thing to do?

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Matt, Maybe we shouldn't ask whether access to health care for the poor saves money, but we should ask if it has some pay off -- e.g., in terms of making people healthier. You offer the justification for reading literary fiction that a) it is enjoyable b) makes you an informed citizen and c) because it's the right thing to do. An assumption of Currie's article is: OK maybe War and Peace is enjoyable, but lots of people say it isn't and lots say that trashy novels are more enjoyable. So, what extra value does it provide? Well, Currie is asking in part whether it does make us more informed. Surely the last point -- about it being the right thing to do -- is either clearly false or question-begging.

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" Asking whether literature "earns its keep" is a vulgar and unfortunate cultural manifestation that seems to dominate just now. It crops up in many places like whether a liberal education "pays off" in the job market. " "Capitalism serves to make a commodity out of everything." Marx

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JK from Indiana hits the right point: this is an ill-posed question. Since so many academics and literature types raise it themselves (by claiming that literature does certain things, mostly for the good), I hesitate to blame Prof. Currie for restating the question of literature's use. But Currie's scientism is the worst possible way of approaching this issue. The real problem here is that the humanities remain wedded to a scientific method. A question like, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better People?" will never be adequately answered by evidence and data. Our error is to think that the effects of Portrait of a Lady or Hamlet on an individual or group can be quantified and calculated. It's not that we can't apply scientific method to literature: we can, and can generate data with which to draw our conclusions. But we're fools if we think that such data and conclusions indicate anything more than the answers to the particular language game we've chosen to play. Why must literature continue to justify itself along these lines? My sense is that this sort of scientism and use-value dialogue regarding literature is tied to our circumstances, our place in history. As a culture we have never been so data dependent, so data driven. Our institutions of higher education have never been so besieged, their defenders so pressed to justify (in use-value terms) the activities of humanistic study. For those of us in academia, I hope we can resist these pressures in the future.

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What other "lines" should be used to justify literature, then, if not scientific approach? Rhetoric - the person who most convincingly says "what I like is important" wins? Habit - sorry, I mean "tradition", or if writ really large, "culture". What the people currently in power did up through age 18 - Einstein's "common sense" Don't see why you're scared of data.

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It's just great to see that at least a few people still care about reading books. I'll bet the average age of commentators here is 50+. For myself biographies and memoirs have risen to the top of the pile beside my bed--the characters are more real, the hardships more intense, the evocation of the complexities of the human experience more palpable. Try Robb's Hugo, of Danchev's Cezanne---I can hardly wait for Richardson's last volume on Pablo.

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What about trying on other places, personae, options before expending the real world time and money to act? Small town libraries with their great and somewhat great stories certainly gave many kids that "book as magic carpet" experience. Great literature made the trip classy. Morality was folded into this imaginary journey exercise. Gender oppression/depression was not going to lead to a jump in front of a train or an affection for Russians' depressive tendencies. And Pippi Longstockings might have been good for Anna K.

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..."psychological research, which is sophisticated enough these days to make a start in testing our proposition." Except that it isn't. While, as a scientist, I can't begrudge a good scientific answer to a good scientific question, psychological research currently has few of either. So let's not enlist psychologists in this quest to answer an ill-posed question about 'great' literature and morality.

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Thanks for speaking the truth about science. I hope scientists are wondering about why the rest of the world is expecting them to have all the answers about everything all the time. (The way they used to expect from God.)

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Unfortunately, thanks to the new common core - 70 percent of what students read in English class now as to be nonfiction. Very, very sad state of affairs. Most of the nonfiction they have to read is not very interesting and discourages them from reading. And alas, they lose so much of the world because of this. Thanks Obama -- whose kids are in private school where they read a lot more lit.

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Professor Currie wrote, "I am not yet persuaded by the moral case against drones." In this, his focus is on a tactic, rather than on the problem. What is wrong is not the use of unmanned flying vehicles in killing strangers, but the killing of strangers in the service of political and economic interests. War is wrong even though we concoct fancy theories to justify it, and focusing on one way of conducting war obfuscates the problem. Likewise, focusing on one putative effect of reading novels obscures whatever reading novels may do for the reader. Why would reading novels per se make one a more moral creature? Depends on the novel, no? Some novels focus on moral questions, but others do not. Some novels are well written, and others are not. Some novels engage you, but not me, and vice versa. Too much focus on the trees in this essay, so we fail to perceive the forest. The question is better posed when it focuses on the effects of reading novels generally rather than on whether reading novels improves out moral

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sensibilities. Only a fool would think that the exercise of a prolonged engagement with a well-written narrative is equivalent to repeatedly staring at paint drying on a wall; surely the two activities have differing effects. But which one makes me a better person isn't at all clear, and nor is it clear that what goes on in my mind when spending hours watching paint dry on walls is the same as what goes on in your mind when doing the same thing.

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Although a connection between art and morals may very well exist, it would be a Herculean task to trace it. Besides, we all know that experience teaches that there are plenty of good people who have never read any great literature and plenty of wicked people who read it all the time. Although it's gone out of fashion (because of its focus on, and celebration of, Western culture), the "Great Books" movement in America in the 1920s and 1930s continues to offer the best argument for reading great literature--and it's not a moral one. People like John Erskine argued that reading great literature developed a common language and points of reference that linked those in the present to Western culture as a whole, and that it takes us out of our increasingly specialized world and lets us talk to one another across disciplines.

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'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.' (This is the only episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that is really worth watching.)

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Literature may have a social value -- as literary history, a much more appropriate discipline than social psychology when it comes to this topic, has clearly shown -- precisely because of its power to undermine the very idea of "moral expertise." Its task is not, or not only, to buttress a prevalent social morality, but to help us question the parameters of a given moral framework via strategies that are not reducible to empirical calculations. It aims at or points us toward a truth that is not factual -- another kind of truth, and one that is closer to the human experience than your scientific abstractions.

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What is "moral expertise"? This is a good example of language that obscures rather than clarifying an issue. And by the way, are the commenters aware of the "ethical turn" in recent fiction? I assume that the article is partly in response to that. The idea is that the moral relativism, playfulness and self-involvement of postmodern fiction keeps readers from involvement in serious social issues.

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"A perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age."--Albert Einstein. Here literature is being treated as a medicine the yield from which can be a statistically significant increase in moral goodness.

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Fortunately, literature has helped teach me that it's not so simple. I don't need proof that a peach is sweet.

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Interesting topic, and an important one. I would argue that it is the exposure to a continuity of civilization that literature provides. Knowing that many others have lived, and pondered life, provides a sense of being human.. And the possibility of joining that long stream of thinkers, not necessarily writing but simply enjoying the flow and the eddies, is an entree into the fellowship of men & women who have gone before. Having joined, with a stake in the game, one's own sense of responsibility is enhanced.I believe that we can all agree that reponsibility for good and evil begins and ends at the personal level. Besides, everyone knows the value of a good quip, at the right moment.

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Yes! Precisely. And beautifully said.

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I was drawn to this article to see if it would provide evidence that my taste for non-literary fiction -- often fantasy (Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman) -- is as corrosive as disdainful friends suggest. It doesn't address that, but the question is related: is there utility in whatever we read? Is it essentially better to be a reader than not? I find myself wondering, as habitual readers do, what the author is getting at. Are we asking whether literary fiction improves us morally so we can determine if we invest too much in it? Are we evaluating whether literature should be canonized and taught In schools? The easy answer to that is yes -- because cultures benefit from common reference points, whether mythologies (spiritual or political), fairy tales, or literature. And a global culture requires more universal references points. The stories from the canon of literary fiction provide those commonalities as they are translated into multiple languages and transferred from page to stage to screen to iPad. The real question is how to broaden the universal canon so that we recognize symbols from non-Western literature as well as we recognize Fitzgeralds flashing green light.

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I think fantasy literature is not necessarily corrosive, but will have different effects than literature more grounded in the limitations as well as imaginative possibilities of experience. Fantasy literature often is as much about wish fulfillment as it is about experience. Maybe you would like varying your literary diet, just as an experiment -- Gaiman plus Zemyatin's dystopic novel We, or Gaiman plus Don DeLillo's Underworld or Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Those might be good "gateway" novels for you!

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to cs's suggestion, I would add that good fantasy and/or science fiction presents a coherent universe. You have to establish a consistent reality - you can't just have things happen because they will advance the plot. Writers of hard sci-fi judge the quality of a story in part by how many 'gimme's' it has, a 'gimme' being a variation from established physics or science that must be taken on faith - 'gimme faster-than-light travel', e.g. On the one hand, the best hard sci-fi has only a few gimmes (having only one is ideal); on the other, Star Trek is almost entirely gimmes. Either way, the fantasy setting won't compensate for implausible or unbelievable psychology.

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"(Suppose a schools inspector reported on the efficacy of our education system by listing ways that teachers might be helping students to learn; the inspector would be out of a job pretty soon.)" This entire article is nothing more than a straw man argument. Apparently, the scientistic model of understanding, i.e., quantifying qualitative data, is at its core. Citing controlled experiments on short, specifically designed texts proves nothing. In fact, the parenthetical statement above shows his own ignorance of the cuurent "reformist" approach to education that is unfortunately gaining greater traction every day due to philanthropic behemoths like the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations. All of them happily specify the ways teachers should be helping students to learn, and are investing millions of dollars to convince federal and state legislators to adopt their "prescriptions" for improving education. "Out of a job?"-not hardly. Reading literature, be it "great" or mediocre, allows one to experience how it feels to walk in another person's shoes. This simple act enlightens the reader, and expands one's perspective on one's own life experiences as well as becoming more empathetic to the lives of others. Can those experiences be easily quantified outside of specific demographic data? Determining morality through a set of experimental results is the epitome of reductionism. "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." ~Einstein

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To see the importance of literature on a societal level, come to Cambodia, where I live. Cambodia has rich cultural traditions--particularly musical--but the after-effects of the Khmer Rouge's massacre of the educated are still very much present. Specifically, education is not valued in and of itself (it is viewed mostly as a means to an end) especially the humanities. I rarely see anyone reading anything except for junk magazines, and television is omnipresent. There is also an unfortunate persistence of xenophobia, sexism, class stigma, superstition and tolerance for corruption/cheating at all levels. I am not saying that lack of interest in literature causes these problems, or that Cambodians as a people are immoral. But I do believe that more exposure to literature that challenges assumptions and tradition, which introduces reader to different

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cultures/ideas, would have a positive impact in addressing these issues. Even more complex plots on Khmer television and movies would probably go a long way (it is usually cliche horror films). The benefits of literature are hard to see at the individual level or in the short term, and 'morally better' is nearly impossible to measure. But surely offering different perspectives and fostering dialogue is better for humanity in the long run. I would be interested to see a study on countries or groups that read the most fiction.

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I agree with DCserver. I have seen similar conditions in Pakistan, where simplistic interpretations of religion and morality are accepted more often because a nuanced reading of faith requires good measure of reading. This promotes intolerance. I believe when people are not used to read and write about complex ideas which require a good command of language and not numbers then society as a whole suffers. Simplistic slogans by religious authorities get them popularity and the same get the corrupt opportunistic politicians elected.

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While all this may well be true, it does not make a case for 'cause and effect'. Anectdotal evidence, no matter what the scale, is still meaningless.

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I'm very much with the Jonathan on the patronizing rhetoric and the overall banality of this little piece. However, there was a quote I once found interesting, which expressed something to the effect that yes, literature is no moral guide and it is of little use generally, but every day people make terrible mistakes for the lack of things found in literature. I've long forgotten the exact wording and its author but it seems to me there is more insight in those few words than in Professor Currie's article.

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Banal? Surely you jest. I used to spend summers in Gilleleje & found most of the Danes a bit banal.

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Peki, perhaps you are thinking of some lines from a poem by William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." --from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

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William Carlos Williams--"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

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Morality is fundamentally lived not thought, so I doubt acquiring expert knowledge of moral dilemmas will be much help at all. Almost the only thing it has to offer is the ability to narrow down the list of helpful habits one could or should cultivate and sometimes refine a particularly poorly thought out habit. Literature, on the other hand, may contribute most by providing examples to imitate.

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I don't think anyone reads literature to become a better human being. One reads literature because one loves to read good literature. There is the magic to the written word and there is pleasure in it that defies definition. I know perfectly good, moral and ethical people who have no idea what literature is. It is almost useless to tell someone to read literature who has no taste for it. It is no different from music. We hear music because we love music and what it does to us, not because it makes a better human being of us. Having said that, I still think that the influence of literature and music, and of course art, is a positive one. For one thing, it keeps us occupied in harmless activity, for it is difficult to be planning hostile actions and to feel hatred while listening to Mozart or to Indian classical ragas or while reading and enjoying Proust. But there is more than that. Literature and art bring us closer to the mystery that Life is. It makes us curious and interested in the complex but fascinating aspects of life. It makes us know ourselves better. And who knows, if we don't like what we see in the mirror provided to us by literature, may be we will try to change and be a bit better as human beings. But that is not granted.

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The real question isn't why you read literature, but why we force our children to do it and why we think it is educational??? I like to play golf, but we don't force our kids to do it and claim it is educational and makes them better people. Without empirical evidence, the argument for teaching literature revolves around the same faith as is needed for religion.

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But didn't lots of Germans rush off to invade Russia and its other Soviet states with hymns of Wagner urging on their moral superiority?

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Great literature inspires us to think, and can inspire us to act, in the ways contemplated and discussed by the author. If the book is about evil, and evildoers, that makes us ponder the nature of evil and perhaps take a look at our actions. Likewise, if there are characters who we greatly admire, we may attempt to emulate them in real life. But that system is not infallible -- novels are not instruction manuals. So, the fact that people who have done evil read

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great books, or listen to great music, can't be laid at the writer or composer's door. It is their failing, not the book's.

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Reading great lit ruined my taste, I find modern novels a waste, Reading Trollope and Mann Made other books wan, Too shallow with poor aftertaste.

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People who read great literature are most often people who are somewhat isolated and more than somewhat alienated from the plebeian population. Interactions between commoners and the literati are sparse. And what is morality? Being nice to people? Shunning unnecessary harm? Much worthwhile literature goes far towards invoking moral ambiguity as being at the core of human relations and action. For those of us not wishing to live in a "utilitarian utopia," a society that acknowledges the importance of Michelangelo or Dante, and values more than Fordism, is something we strive for, even if we know not why. A commentator mentioned Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov. I may not be superior, morally or otherwise, to anyone on this planet for my familiarity with this work, but I would certainly be a lesser person without having read the "Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima" or the story of Kolya Krasotkin. In the final analysis, do Shakespeare, Proust and Chekhov make anyone "better" in terms of morality? Maybe they do not. But they make them more interesting as people and more attuned as citizens; they raise their level of awareness and heighten their moral antennae. Great literature allows us to live the life we never did, to be someone other than who we are, to immerse ourselves, however briefly, in a world gone by. Looking at modern life, with its cultural nihilism and techno-dictatorship, that inner library is something I would not, I dare not, be without.

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Here is the most plausible connection between literature and morality: The economically well-off are over-represented among readers of serious literary fiction. Because research has shown that there are no fixed virtues and that much behavior is influenced by situational factors, and as the less well-off more frequently find themselves ion situations conducive to breaking moral rules (e.g. against lying and stealing), it follows that readers of serious literature are less likely to break moral rules than the general population. Of course, in this case the one has absolutely nothing directly to do with the other. Now here is another matter entirely: reading serious literature is positively associated with becoming an educated person. This doesn't require or even admit of evidence because since the concept of education itself came upon the scene, literature was conceived as essential to it. Literature (grammar in the

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relevant sense as we translate it from the Greek) was one of the basic trivium of verbal liberal arts.

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I think reading books, viewing plays and movies allows us to live and perhaps understand multiple lives. I think this helps me enjoy the fullness of life and perhaps, although I am not sure about this, be a bit more empathetic. But I am sure that experiencing these stories is fun.

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If reading great literature makes us better, then English departments should be filled with wonderful, caring, affirming colleagues, not self-interested individuals seeking promotions and accolades.

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Don't blame books for the failed shoesalesmen who sell them in our schools. Blame the misguided admin guys who pay the messenger to be a toady. Blame the Penn State that sheltered millionaire coach Paterno, the Rutgers that hired 2 creepy half-million dollar coaches, and blame the schools where bringing patrons and wealthy students means everything. And then reform post-secondary education, not with the rare teaching award, but greater emphasis on culture and humanism than on football and endowments.

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Reading books might be fun for some but it has no useful purpose in the 21st century economy unless you are a professor of philosophy or something where you're paid to be useless.

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Perhaps it's better to be paid to be useless than to do so for nothing. Keep in mind you and I are not paid for our comments here.

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Dr. Dillamond said: > Reading mediocre fiction is incredibly dull, and exasperating, > because the characters often do illogical things... Completely in agreement with you about the superiority of literary fiction, but are you telling me the Karamozov brothers don't do illogical things?

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I suspect Dr Dillamond didn't quite choose the right word in 'illogical'. I think he was more likely referring to characters acting in ways that were not consistent to the character, setting or circumstances, simply because the action was required in order to advance the plot or, worse, to make a didactic point. You, the writer, can convince me, the reader, that Character A can walk on the ceiling despite the law of gravity; but once I say 'I don't believe Character A would walk on the ceiling; he's just not that kind of man,' your story fails.

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And if you're a really great writer, you can convince me Character A, in walking across the ceiling, has acted out of his usual character, as we all do in real life now and then.

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I think you're misreading Dr Dillamond. The brothers do illogical things, but act within character. In mediocre fiction, the characters do things which do not ring true, usually because, in order for the plot to advance, they have to do them. E.g., The beautiful scientist with the Ph.D should have enough brains to know better than to go alone into the abandoned Gothic mansion, but if she doesn't, there is no way the villain can kidnap her. So she has to act like an 11year-old who has never seen even one horror movie.

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Reading great books makes you better at reading. Also at organizing your ideas cogently, and maybe at writing. Does that make you a better person?

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One reason these arguments about literature one way or the other feel so inadequate is they make a methodological error of omission. In extreme way of rephrasing the philosophical question here would be to not ask what is the effect of good literature on people, but what is the way human nature reacts to literature. The symbols are on some level inert; it is the human mind that does whatever the effects are. This can easily be proven by looking at "good literature" in terms of popularity. Some [I'd contend most] works are popular in their time because they are reflective of the values and beliefs already present in the society. Occasionally though, you have an author who goes completely unnoticed during their lifetime that then finds mass popularity in a different era. At least at some levels, literature's popular effect is related to [if not reflective of] how society is structured in the moment. So returning to the central thesis: most great literature probably only seems to make us better out of a societal self-reinforcement. Moral sensibilities of one person have transmitted to and internalized by another. If you could call that "making people better" is debatable. But I think there are handfuls of true masterpieces that transcend societal content. For example, McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" is a collision of linear and non-linear thought. There is no cultural escape from such a fundamental aspect of being a thinking thing, thus it will always have resonance.

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As a 15 year plus high school and college teacher of literature, I'm not sure if literature has such an automatic effect on the masses, especially if we are looking for automatic gains in empathy and human morality. There is also an argument that teaching some books to the young, are simply wasted. Remembering reading _Great_Gatsby_ when you were 16 and not getting it,

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but then picking it up at 30 and realizing how profound Fitzgerald was about aging, wealth, and the American dream. Ultimately literature doesn't make you any more moral than having an appreciation for modern art, classical music, or quantum physics. However, it might make you more humane just because anytime one willingly explores some facet of human creation in depth, one has the potential to become more aware of our humanity. Personally, literature has helped me for the last 20 years to be a better person, but it might have been the discipline of applying myself to the task and committing to reading at least 1 novel a week that did this more than literature itself. Harold Bloom's _Where_Shall_Wisdom_be_Found_?, explains how literature isn't going to make anyone a better person just because we throw it at them. English departments failed at this task in the 80s and 90s when they tried to reclaim the canon from the dead white males as a moral imperative and cure for years of cultural oppression. Ultimately, appreciation of literature is an aesthetic issue, not a moral one.

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To try designing an experiment to test the eff ects of reading War and Peace"--in some kind of artificial vacuum (N.B. unable to insert appropriate quotation marks for some unknown reason), or any other work of literature, seems silly to me. Everything we have previously read may or may not be brought to bear on our reaction to "W & P." What we do, consciously or unconsciously, is weigh or measure what we get from it, either in snippets or as a whole, within the boundaries of our literary experience, which grows with each reading or re-reading. Occasionally, a single story or poem (or even a line or an image) may strike us in some special way, but usually we use all our applicable inventory. Yes, literature broadens us and gives us an array of experiences to choose from that relate to situations we encounter in our own lives. It can foster greater control over how we live because we have more choices available.

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I read great literature because it's so much more complex and nuanced and rewarding than what modern mass culture has to offer: watching Mad Men or Game of Thrones after reading George Eliot or Shakespeare is like stopping at McDonalds on the way home from a three-star Michelin restaurant. After reflecting on Donne's poems or wading through Proust, I may not feel more compassion for other people--in fact, I probably don't--but I've learned to see myself and my own experiences and musings as less-than-unique, at the same time as I have a much greater ability to discern the simple-minded attempts to sell me garbage, whether it's coming from a TV commercial, a talking-head on CNN, or a politician.

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Or, Matthew M, a philosophy professor who slings around terms like "evidence" as if we all have signed onto the thrall of The Scientific Method into which he has fallen. He is the prisoner of his own cramped epistemology. EVIDENCE!! I spent thirty years of my life as a trial lawyer living and dying by the Federal Rules of Evidence. But it finally became clear to me that there are ways of knowing other -- and, in their domain, better -- epistemologies than secular ones. So I left law practice and went into ministry. Albert Einstein appreciated this. He declared that religion deals with matters of ultimate import matters that cannot be apprehended through demonstration but [rather only] through revelation . . . . One must not attempt to justify them, he said, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. Great literature likewise deals with matters of ultimate import. Literature creates an opportunity for people to be taken to a spacious place where remarkable things unfold within them, where they can do the kind of "sensing" of which Einstein spoke. As the great literature scholar Harold Bloom says of Shakespeare and his audiences, "he puts their lives on stage." What they do with that no one can guarantee or prove. But is our world the better for the creation of such opportunities? In thunder, yes. It is only the stupid cynicism of Professor Currie that occludes his view of this reality, which needs no "studies" to "prove" it.

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What I have always failed to understand is why people who read great literature and eat great food and drink great wine and go to museums to look at great paintings then listen to such horrid music. How can someone claim to understand the depths of Stendhal and then only want to "rock out" to the sounds of Sting or Carlos Santana? They're the equivalent of Dan Brown.

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It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

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I read only "great" literature for one reason: after I got onto it, nothing less satisfied. The greats are better because they really are better. Reading mediocre fiction is incredibly dull, and exasperating, because the characters often do illogical things, have no genuine personality, and you just don't believe most of it. The things they do and say are not consistent with what we know to be true. In great literature, on the other hand, there is always the bell going off that says, "Yes! RIght!" The surprises are genuine, and the satisfaction is deeper. Does it make me a better person? Probably not. Maybe some. Dickens taught me the importance of compassion; Shakespeare taught me to see the common humanity in all, and to distrust appearances; Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder taught me the value of the present moment; the Illiad teaches the futility of pride; Thoreau teaches the value of simplicity; James and Checkov show the troubles of lives unlived, and of misplaced love...and on and on. But

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I'm not sure I'm any better for having absorbed those lessons. One only learns by living. Reading can then confirm and consolidate what one already knows. If you don't already know it, you won't understand it, anyway, and it will only bore you.

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Dr. Dillamond states "In great literature, on the other hand, there is always the bell going off that says, "Yes! RIght!" The surprises are genuine, and the satisfaction is deeper." ...and closes with... "If you don't already know it, you won't understand it, anyway, and it will only bore you." Spoken with true assumption. What I know and what you know as "great" literature might be very different. The problem I have is not with literature, but with pretensions to definitive knowledge of what constitutes greatness. I marvel at how you look down your nose with the last line. Is there no chance that what bores you, or that something you do not understand, could be great literature, especially to someone with different and equally valid values and preferences? The question of whether great literature makes a better person begs the question of what constitutes great literature, and that is a very problematic question for anyone who is not as certain that they know the answers. If the answer is: great literature is great because I say so, or the ones with the most money or guns say so, then maybe there is reason for looking at some empirical methods for measuring greatness in literature and, afterwards, its impact.

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You surprisingly neglect to mention one of the harshest critics of literature in all of history: Plato. His insight is very simple: we have no guarantee that anything poets/ authors say is true. The point is about methodology. What method do poets have whereby they establish that anything they say is true? Clearly they have none. Or, to the extent that they have a valid methodology for arriving at the truth, they become scientists or philosophers. And this gives the lie to many of the posters here who babble on about how literature "opens us up to the wonder of the world" or some other such nonsense. What evidence do you have that any of this "wonderful world" literature supposedly opens us up to has any resemblance to the actual world? "Well, I had an inspiring, warm, fuzzy feeling when I read it, so it must be true." Poets have a very powerful instrument. But they literally don't know what they are doing. Or, if they do know what they are doing, they have to show it using argument and evidence: in other words, they have to become philosophers and scientists. Until they do so, anything they say should be treated with extreme suspicion.

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Plato also was a literary author. But the truth of any of the claims made in his dialogues depends solely on the soundness of the arguments made therein.

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We also have no way of knowing Plato accurately recorded the dialogues of Socrates. Like most of his ancient colleagues, Plato is notable for the fact that he thought at all, not specifically what he thought.

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@ACW You obviously know nothing about Plato. No one thinks he "accurately recorded the dialogues of Socrates" nor that he even intended to do so. And he is not notable because "he thought at all". Everyone in the Ancient world thought. He is notable because of what he thought and the arguments he used.

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John T, I read Plato. When I say I don't believe he accurately recorded the dialogues of Socrates, I don't mean merely that they were not recorded verbatim. I mean his dialogues are largely Socrates arguing with a variety of straw men. Either these so-called debates did not take place at all, or the people of Athens were extremely stupid. Some of it holds up but most of it does not. The same is true of Aristotle and the majority of the pre-Socratics -they did the best they could, working from a position of almost complete ignorance.

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The professor's questions seem a little off key in some respects. He seems to want proof that literature helps people make the "right" decisions. I would think a more scientific approach would simply to investigate how literature influences us. There is really no proof, for instance, that reading the Bible helps people make better moral decisions. As a matter of fact, people have used the Bible to justify killing, slavery, wife-beating, war, and other assorted horrors. However, it does seem that the Bible did seem to influence these people in some way. Likewise, I am guessing that Homer, Dickens, Melville, and Shakespeare have inspired their share of misguided thinking and action. But the fact that they have influenced life in some way is undeniable.

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I know I would rather spend time with people who have read great literature and thought about it than those who haven't. If you are lucky enough to read great books from other times and cultures, your horizons broaden as do your ideas about your fellow men and women. And don't get me started about how Dickens shocked the English into doing something about the destitute. One assumes that Professor Currie has had the benefit of a broad education or else he wouldn't be in the position he's in now. The fact that he has read widely and still believes you can put a price on great literature makes me think of an old saying, "pearls before swine."

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Wouldn't it make sense to define your concepts "morally better" and "benefits" [of literature] before formulating an argument using them?

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"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." --Dickens, David Copperfield Historically the whole appeal of the bildungsroman is that it addresses this question. Is there some narrative meaning to one's life, and in that narrative is one ultimately a hero or a failure?

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"Moral expertise" seems a bit of a straw man. People have always told each other stories. Why? As Shakespeare says, it's a way of holding the mirror up to nature, of seeing who we are, and what the human condition is like. At least this is what the greatest literature tends to do. Stories permeate and shape our lives in ways we probably aren't aware of. They are how we talk to ourselves in the darkness and confusion of existence. As to the moral effect of literature and other arts, the sympathetic presentation of gays in novels, movies, and TV shows has had something to do, I would guess, with the recent change in American attitudes toward gay marriage and acceptance of the equal humanity of gays. But I also suspect that the kind of violence that dominates the movies--in which the victims are presented without sympathy, or with a kind of gleeful bloodlust--has had consequences too. The evidence isn't in, as Professor Currie would say; and there is the further complication of distinguishing between great art, escapism, and propaganda.

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Some quite significant part of my being comes from literature. Literature has allowed me to have a number of great friends, who I've loved and admired and learned from. I would not be who I am today (for better or worse), had I not had help from Tolstoy, Proust and Musil, among the many others. Quantifying this is similar to quantifying art itself. When we have algorithms for Shakespeare and a formula for Mozart we will have made headway on that one.

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Why waste a literary education on people who will spend their lives working at Walmart or managing McDonalds? Please! Especially when the value of such an education is unproven, scientifically. Literary education is best reserved for those who can afford it and for those who can responsibly interpret it. Wouldn't you agree with that, Mr. Currie?

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The notion that reading improves morals is nonsense!

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What reading inspires is more reading...and more and more. That misguided use of books as "moral" guides leads to the deplorable list of "classics" that kids are forced to read in elementary school! If reading made moral paragons of us I would be a saint. I am not!

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One way to know what you are is to read about what you might be,, as you surely have done, often but not exclusively in books with characters aspiring to become saints -- and to learn, as you have, how hard being a saint is. You have done well there, too.. Could a book make one a saint? No, only clarify that dream and increase our understanding of the incompleteness of the task. And that's inherent in us, to dream and measure. Books help. They let us live vicariously through others' experiences. The saints' lives, e.g.

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Never mind the question of whether exposure to literature improves our morals. Can somebody demonstrate that exposure to philosophical thought improves anything?

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John T, you are cherry-picking your philosophers, to say the least. One could as easily note that philosophy has provided the underpinning for all the evils that you name. Try thinking about your answer before you volunteer it.

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@ACW So, according to your way of thinking, we haven't benefited from science either because some scientists were wrong. To say we have benefited from science is to "cherry pick" your scientists. Try harder.

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John T., simply to insult and gainsay is not a rebuttal. Try again.

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If literature does not inspire us to seek justice and honesty in our lives, then why do some of our greatest writers of literature and poetry end up imprisoned, poisoned, assassinated, tortured, exiled? Why all this fuss over writers of great literature - -or great artists of all kinds -- if works of art do not matter?

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I would like to comment on the Meehl and Kahneman part of the story. Nether of these authors profess that common sense is the best guide to truth. Meehl compared statistical versus clinical judgment and found that the statistical approach to be superior, hardly less complex than common sense. Kaheman cites that the blink response or his system 1 responses leads to faulty conclusions and he advocates a more thoughtful (more systematic) approach (his system 2) to be used for important decisions. Secondly, he is confusing

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Kahneman's work with Nate Silver's findings on predictions. How these findings germane to his premise?.

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The question is whether reading (and understanding) great literature makes us morally better than we would otherwise have been. Literary critics declare that of course it does (they would, wouldn't they?), But the answer is, as Greg Currie argues, that there is insufficient evidence either way

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Actually--as a I pointed out below--literary critics do not say that "Great Literature Make Us Better People". Sixty or seventy years ago, that was a position that a scholar might argue. Now, it is not. Even the category of "great literature"-and what it is supposed to mean-has been subjected to extreme scrutiny. The idea does still float around high schools, but that doesn't mean it is a serious question for philosophical inquiry. So, asking that question now is akin to asking this question--now: Does the colonization of other nations civilize native peoples? Why, it's impossible to say! We think it does, but some cynics are skeptical. We don't like to take it on faith. The only way we will know if those people have been civilized would be to conduct a thorough series of psychological tests to see if they have undergone moral improvement. No one would ask the above. But it's the same.

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I think this widespread belief is a holdover from a time when for most people, the most available literary fiction was the Bible. The more similar, along various dimensions of similarity, a piece of literature is to the Bible (including awkward, difficult-to-decipher phrasing and vocabulary, and obscure, dark, fragmented story lines), the more valuable it is assumed to be.

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Why read literature that lives through generations and cultures? Because together the works that survive tell one great story, the story of who we are, the traditions we have inherited. The great stories simply help us find our place in the great tradition of human culture. That doesn't make us better people, doesn't erase childhood traumas, doesn't affect our DNA, just helps us learn what the values of the tradition are. Lit/Crit is all about learning the tradition.

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Sorry, Wally, it does make us better people. It makes us better people because it opens our minds to the realities of other people's experiences, and to everything we have in common with the rest of humankind. Reading a book by a great author is exactly like having a long, intimate, detailed conversation with that person. It is always uplifting, refreshing and a tonic for the mind. People who understand the importance of weight training

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for health ought to consider the reality of how much stronger your mind will be if you bother to actually read every word of a novel by Balzac. Well translated, of course -- or, ideally, in the original French. I mastered French as a young teenager in a California public high school. My French teachers came from the Caribbean, North Africa, Canada and the Caucasus. Each brought a unique perspective on history and all knew the French classics backward and forward (not to mention a whole lot of other subjects). By the way, the same principle applies to classical music. I would much rather enjoy a private interlude with Mozart than any of today's big shots. The great composers left us a vast collection of works through which to access their hearts and vast experience living.

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Literature can be a broad term, do mean as well, movies, TV? At heart it is a story, either fiction or partial truth. I believe, but cannot prove, that we learn from stories. perhaps those we hear directly from other people, more than ones in books. Perhaps TV has more moral sway than literary novels because it seems to be directly from other people, ? unscripted to our mind. The core question is: how do we get facts and then opinions from medial at large. Obviously, there are factors that influence us, perhaps not those that read "War and Peace" but the average guy who reads James Patterson, that lead to our understanding of facts and moral choices. I would posit that getting facts straight may be a role for literature and Morals can be left to our parents, our church and our communities.

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Novels and art in general do not have to bring moral enlightenment any more than reading mathematics or physics bring moral enlightenment. To belittle aesthetics and art history by insisting that art must be "more" is to belittle art itself. Art is about issues such as experience, and humanizing time, and constructing narratives that try to capture experience and time and convey them to future generations as a legacy from the past. As such, it is important that art in general retain a morally neutral grounding, thereby allowing specific examples of art to take moral positions, postive or negative. To claim that science or mathematics should be applied to art in order to measure each artwork's moral value is similar to claiming that we do not know the moral value of physics yet because we have not conducted enough scientific (psychological) tests using large enough audiences.

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Robert Bork argued in defense of censorship "to root out the worst in our popular culture". He asked why, when our society overwhelmingly accepts the idea that good art/music/literature improves us, do we deny that bad art/music/literature debases us?

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It is a good argument, assuming the premise is correct. Currie suggests it may not be. Thank goodness. Those insisting they are better people for reading 'good books' might think again about how that view supports the Bork-types they profess to hate.

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The problem quickly becomes political: who decides what to censor, and on what grounds? I think we can pretty easily see why nobody wants to go that route, even when acknowledging that some literature can indeed harm. That's the premise of porn, isn't it?

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The premise here - that we need empirical evidence for the value of great literature - is all wrong. It is part of the wrong turn the humanities made when they started to emulate the sciences. I am a scientist who loves reading great literature. I do it because one of my values is keeping alive the best that civilization has to offer. I do not need empirical evidence for doing that. In fact, given the deplorable state of the writing in scientific papers, I would say that scientists need to pay more attention to great literature than literary critics need to pay to empirical evidence that literature is good for you.

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I agree. It's always a joy to read a scientific paper or listen to an oral presentation from a scientist who can actually write or communicate well. In fact, I believe scientists who are able to do these activities well are more likely to get financial support/ publicity/ public support to advance their work. A scientific paper is a form of story-telling, just with a particular pre-determined structure and proof needed for what is stated. On another note, I read literature because the best novels distill truths about reality/ life into a few characters, events, etc. A book that still informs me about science, medicine, politics, and money to this day is Sinclair Lewis' 1926 Pulitzer-winning novel "Arrowsmith."

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I haven't read fiction since I read a John Grisom novel, "The Appeal," in 2010. Fiction allows authors to express ideas that would not be acceptable discussion in public, like dark money from off-shore accounts used to influence elections. Try bringing that up in public --- see what I mean. Science, math, history, politics, have so much more to teach us to be better human beings. Fiction is the fluf that fills our ears.

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Yes -- asking for empirical evidence always sounds good, but that's rather, too, the logic of those who would standardize test everything, as if all good learning, and its strategies, could be reduced to numbers.

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The U.S., in its rush to the expanded materialism of Gross National Product, made the same error in Nam 50 years ago. All the "Best and the Brightest" reduced Nam then to their supply side numbers graphs -- for obviously easy victory over Charlie in his abject black pajamas and rubber sandals. Charlie -- all the VC, along with most all the peasants -- had heart, not trackable and graphable numbers. We can measure heart, I think, by the standard tools of lit evidence. Does the writer cast a wide enough skein? -- with wide enough, specific enough vocabulary to capture heart? -- with grammar apt enough for complexities? (or simple enough also)? The view from corporate academe shows not growing literacy connected to hearts, and to wider landscapes, but, instead, to specialization. All gets narrowed, reduced. This might satisfy the urge for more apt empirical evidence (all of a departmentalized ilk) -- but it reduces imagination. It ignores and replaces the truly human, as we did in Nam, and are doing again under the tyranny of today's standardized testers, lunatic, computer-algorythmed financiers, and consumerism marketerss.

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Great literature can be morally improving indirectly, whether by exposing the reader to different cultures, fostering the 'theory of mind' (i.e., that others' feelings and thoughts are different from one's own, a key psychological function which autistics lack), illustrating how the world works, or simply providing practical information. That is how fiction civilises us. Very few outright didactic works are good literature. (The play The Trojan Women comes to mind, but most writers who set themselves up as preachers or scolds are closer to Ayn Rand than Euripides.) Anything that makes you think or feel is potentially a morally and/or intellectually improving experience, but art is not, and should not be, cod liver oil.

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Slicing and dicing literature so that its value can be quantified only as an exercise in morality is about as insulting as letting the bankers who engineered the foreclosure disaster by slicing and dicing toxic loans to innocents get away Scott free. Professor Currie sounds like a propagandist for the "let's burn all the books" crowd.

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Wow! So many unsophisticated comments! And unsubtle and unsupple understandings of 'moral'. Literature educates the imagination (not a thought or assertion original with me.) Which leads to other developments. Maturation, insight, empathic potentials, taste formation, rejection of stupidity, misunderstandings and new understanding of one's misunderstandings, characters we love who are plain wrong (Austen, Twain), appreciations of being gulled (my 15yo students from 40 years who were strongly upset, appalled, after reading A Modest Proposal),

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the indifference of the world (Crane, Mann) --- all this and much much more await anyone who reads thoughtfully. And yet here so much dogma about morals and moral meanings. Some weak reading and thinking and reflecting going on here.

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Some philosophers may be "careful folk," but Gregory Currie certainly doesn't seem to be. How "literature" became attached to moral value has been well-examined, and is an old, old debate in literary studies. Currie treats the subject as if it is a novel philosophical question and poses the question as if the idea exists as a universal cultural idea ("you agree with me, I expect) or outside of history. The "we's" and "most of us" that he posits--that is a careful philosophical argument? Even a quick reading of the first chapter of Terry Eagleton's ubiquitous _Literary Theory: An Introduction_ (agree with it or not), would prevent most from arguing against a bunch of straw-man commonplaces. But that would only be, well, an introduction; no serious literary historian of the last few decades would take that value-attachment for granted. Has Currie read any of them? Or does he only read the New Yorker's web site?

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If you want to make charts and graphs so you can prescribe doses of literature guaranteed to bring a measurable level of moral health, no. But why do you insist that the effects of literature must be measurable? And how would you measure it? That way lies a morass of subjective opinion and judgment; in other words, stuff better left to literary criticism. People read because we love stories. Whether they are histories or fantasies, stories give us characters and situations to identify with and seek to understand. If something is powerfully written -- and I don't mean necessarily somber, but compelling -- we feel right along with the characters; that is, we have a sense of fellow feeling and empathy for other human beings. It is one way among many of educating our emotions. Literature also gives us a way to talk to one another. I don't know your Aunt Rose or cousin Jim, but we can talk about Anna Karenina and have at least a common place to start talking about marriage, or Russian history, or oppressive societies, or women who abandon their children. Why the heck would anyone want to measure this? To what end?

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Some people can't appreciate a butterfly unless they've chloroformed it, catalogued it, and pinned it to a card.

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Sarah, wonderful. As to why people want to measure literature's "value", it can only be to suggest we need literature study less than sociology or other fuzzy coursework, or art less than science, or writing less than accounting.

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It's money and power, as budgets tighten. Out with Shakespeare and in with yesterday's "discovery" about mankind. I walked out on a conference on bus tickets, really, and newspaper comics, called "Junk as Literature". Junior faculty listed their papers and got increments for this, um, literature. Ever since we painted life stories and observations on cave walls where huge bears roamed, mankind has given art a special place.. Why? Imagine the artists turning in the cave's flickering oil-light to see what his/her racing bison did to the lover's eyes or a child's smile. Art is not chopped liver. I like both, but only one makes me feel more human years later.

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ACW: Yes, exactly! Dr. Bob: I was thinking along the same lines: "Let's quantify the effect of literature so we can say it isn't worth much and then replace it with something that requires rote learning and thus can be measured." It's painful to see what is happening in schools, and this wild misappropriation of the tools for measurement, or even for assessing a need for measurement. Bus ticket literature? That's a hard one to beat!

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Did Charles Dickens awaken the conscience of Victorian England? Tiny Tim still haunts us more than the Ghosts of Christmas Past. It is said that your brain on fiction responds as though the experience was real,. So did Dickens create morality by giving us experiences with the poor and disadvantaged? Just asking.

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The answer to the question in the headline is YES.

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Surely literature makes kids better. For some, that's the main source of morality. There is some diminishing returns from literature as one gets older, where now I prefer reading the NY Times to literature. Still some insights can only come from literature. I can't imagine the insights I gained from Angela's Ashes coming from a newspaper. Anything that gives me more insights makes me better.

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The idea literature teaches special expertise in moral discernment implies there are moral facts in the sense that there are facts about baseball scores, which itself is open to question. Maybe literature trains not moral reasoning but moral sentiments? Imagining the subjective experience of others might be moralising....it's the key to being good for Hume, Adam Smith and co. All fiction gives you practice in feeling with others, imagining experiences other than your own, from a perspective outside yourself. Great fiction lets you practice feeling complex patterns of emotion with complex

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beings like the people you might know: this feels like part of the aesthetic appeal of a great novel or poem. Less good fiction calls up familiar, basic patterns of empathetic emotional experiences, triggered by a black and white imaginary world of devils and angels: as George Eliot argues, such emotinal experience is therefor less good practice for becoming a sympathetic neighbour. This theory seems quite testable: try measuring the heart-rate and recording the reflections and behaviour of subjects shaking hands with a shamed politician after having first read either a copy of the New York Times, an airport novel, or Middlemarch. I'd bet the last group would be more likely to feel pained, express humane compassion, and to let the poor guy borrow their mobile phone.

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During 32 years of teaching theatre at a small midwestern college I always believed that dramatic literature was useful in "ennobling the spirit of man." Yet I can cite only one concrete incident when it actually happened. A football player enrolled in my acting class expressed an explicit anti-gay attitude to me. I was appropriately appalled and suggested he was wrong. To prove my point I asked him to read and then report back to me on Hugh Whitemore's 1986 Breaking the Code, a play about a mathematician who greatly aided his fellow Englishmen in the war against Nazism only to be persecuted after the war for being homosexual. The student did as he was assigned, read the play and returned with tears in his eyes declaring he had a new understanding of his fellowmen. "Oh, Doc, I had no idea," he moaned.

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Dear Professor Currie, One hardly knows where to begin. How do you suppose a capacious soul is created, nourished, furnished? If not on the imaginary tales of legendary characters, then from where? And if you say the great souls that people the corridors of history, then from what streams did their mighty rivers feed so that they might flourish? The issue is not a better or more enlightened moral character, for the frailty and the fallibility of the human condition is hardly subject to quality control, which is what your own scientific soul seems to be searching for, but rather the question is whether a soul inspired by the very greatest works will operate on the very highest levels. For me this represents a tautology. Time spent with the distilled essence of a literary genius is tantamount to adding room after room of brilliance (both good and evil, I should add) in the mansion of one's mind, and if you can't recognize that such a structure adds moral dimensions more malnourished souls can't even dream of, than I suggest you stick to your stacks of silly research and leave the building to your betters. Cordially, S.A. Traina

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I'm sorry to be the only poster on your column so far, Professor Currie, because, though I enjoyed it, I have not read Ms. Nussbaum's book, and I am totally ignorant of the "literature leads to morality" theory. I certainly never thought it did. I myself would not care to take Tolstoy as a moral mentor, although if Lenin had, the world might not have had that bad patch. The only writers from whom I myself can derive moral principles are Dorothy Sayers and Nero Wolfe and their ilk. To understand Shakespeare, you have to start with a morality system which more or less agrees with his, which is more or less Christianity. For education and for illustration of a moral lack, yes, literature is absolutely useful--1984 and Darkness at Noon are not conventional in their moral presumptions, but they make it pretty clear that we would not like any totalitarian system; it would go so far beyond anything which we think of as "moral" that "morality" hardly comes into it. But we already knew that from history. Since I don't think you can write a novel without it's having a background of some sort of morality, I'd have liked you to include Nabokov and Bulgakov in your considerations. Proust, as far I can tell, always knows whether what his characters are doing is moral or immoral--and he frequently tells you which. But sometimes he's like Dostoevsky--he just lets you squirm.

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Of course literature makes us better, and better to learn from history that to repeat the same dismal ignorant mistakes. Raise the Flag is a book with six easy reading stories about the author's hard knocks journey for education.

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If the self is a narrative, perhaps we should learn how to have a one, from the experts in field.

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Reminds me of Good Will Hunting he read all of the right books but had a skewed moral expertise. I just downloaded a list of the best books and have been reading them, most for a second time. How do you not look at the world differently and with a more empathetic outlook after reading, The Grapes Of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird? Great article, thank you for making me think. J

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"Great Literature" is only read in high school, where it is dissected, analyzed, and [mis]understood, but never enjoyed... that comes much later, if at all. The truth is, there was little else we could have done with it, back then; between hormones erupting (and those yet to) and a deafening lack of

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firsthand, adult experiences with Life, "dissect[ing], analyz[ing], [mis]understand[ing]" was about all we could do. "Great Literature" -- like Life -- is wasted on the young.

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I beg to differ. For me reading (including 'great literature') was the place I called my own when I was a kid - deepest pleasure, most reliable comfort, deepest absorption and most instructive introduction to the vastness of human experience. That was also true for all three of my own daughters. I read Shakespeare with them when they were very young - they hadn't learned that it was difficult or 'great' and we acted out the plays, they picked it up like a second language and it was lots of fun. They never stopped reading for the joy of it. It's sad that you somehow never connected with all that when you were young, hope you've discovered it now.

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I have learned some moral lessons from what I've read, such as that it's wrong to unjustly punish a Hippogriff, and you must never separate a child from his daemon. But I suspect Rowling and Pullman don't qualify as great literature, although the worlds and the characters they create have probably influenced more young people than has War and Peace, and have done so at an age at which a mind is susceptible to their influence. Character is built early. What we learn when we're young goes in deeply, and affects the emotions. Moral quandaries encountered in great literature may reach the intellect, but the intellect is mostly used to justify what the emotions are going to have us do anyway. For any literature to have a chance at affecting our moral development, it must be read. It must also be relevant and accessible. Harry Potter is about the death of childhood. It does not talk down to children. It says that there is a world of power and magic that we discover as we grow, and that we can learn to master with the help of schools, teachers, libraries and hard work. There is joy, death, success and failure along the way, and many moral choices to be made. The series of books is more than twice as long as War and Peace, and yet 9-year-olds who were poor readers devoured them. If there is a chance that literature can affect moral character, I can't think of a better example. War and Peace, read later in life, has little chance of grounding a single drone.

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Absolutely true. People who have acquired the gift of loving to read, may read and enjoy great and not so great literature all the day of their lives; but it's what we read when we are young that really makes an impact in our development, moral and otherwise.

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As anyone knows who has experience with people with Alzheimer's, we are our stories; when failing memory robs us of our stories, it robs us of our identities. The universal child fascination with stories helps us form ourselves

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(and our perceptions of our family/tribe). I remember as a child, together with similarly aged cousins, sitting around the very ornate bed of my great-uncle on Sunday afternoons while he and my grandmother and my other great-uncle told family stories. Only many years later did I understand that this was a pleasant indoctrination into the character structure that us younguns were to emulate (or to do our best to avoid). So I see novels as allowing us choices about the kind of persons we want to be, opening new doors to our possibilities.

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Professor Currie begins with an incorrect premise. The purpose of literature is not to make us morally better - nor does it serve an educational purpose to teach us how to live our lives. Literature is not a how-to manual; nor should it ever be placed in the self-help section of a library or bookstore. The first purpose of literature - and perhaps its over-riding reason why we tell stories - belongs to the author him/herself. Why else would anyone put him/herself through the agony and ecstasy of creation in the first place? And the reason that writers write - or painters paint or composers compose - is to bring order out of the seeming chaos of living or reason out of the irrationality of existence. It is to make sense of what the author sees and choses to define. As for us readers, we hopefully can share the author's vision and gain a better understanding of our planet (or galaxy) and those with whom we share it. I don't believe that gaining an understanding of the confusing world we live in is a moral act. I think drawing order out of chaos is a more basic human instinct.

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I was just about to compose a splendid reply to this ridiculous article, but you've done it for me. There are and always have been terrible people who are also very well read, and vice versa. We don't need a study to demonstrate that. For that matter, plenty of great writers have been absolutely noxious people. And that's beside the point of aesthetic experience, the function of which is to open us up to the play of the world. The idea of requiring some sort of moral pragmatism of art is like looking to wine for nutrition. It may have some, but that's not why we adore it.

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In my opinion, the first purpose of literature, or any art, is to entertain the audience. That by no means excludes other purposes -- such as making sense of apparent chaos -- but if the author/composer/painter fails to entertain, he or she has failed -- period. And what entertains audiences? Depends on the audience, the time, the place, and a million other factors. Moral uplift rarely makes the list.

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It is a pleasant thought that Professor Currie might have served us a generous red herring with his opening question, offering a rich bill of fare and variety of comments and views from a large circle of readers. Enjoyed your input. Many thanks.

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Maybe we should stop asking from literature to be our moral educator. It is curious that we have forgotten that literature is first of all an artistic endeavor that has as its end procuring us aesthetic pleasure. Expecting from literature any pragmatic outcome is just a categorical mistake and a misunderstanding. If literature teaches us how to be moral than we are all the better for it, but if it doesn't we should not be surprised or embittered.

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This argument strikes me as wrong-headed in two respects: 1) In the absence of any evidence on the topic, it is entirely appropriate for people to believe that literature improves people morally. A simple Bayesian model would suggest that without any evidence, we should go with our priors on a given topic. So let's consider what an appropriate prior belief structure might be. To my knowledge, no one has made an argument that literature harms people morally, while many have argued that the degree of moral improvement could be large. So it seems like the appropriate prior bounds for an estimate about the effect of literature is something on the order of 0 at the low end, to very high at the high end. Given that estimate (and no evidence to change it), it seems like the appropriate response would be to encourage people to read literature for moral development, even though it would be inappropriate to say, e.g. 'each novel you read makes you 10% more moral.' But that's exactly what people do when they advocate reading literature in the way being criticized here. 2) I don't think anyone really argues that novels lead to moral expertise. Instead, people argue that novels lead to open-mindedness, something more like the Socratic 'knowledge that one knows nothing,' caused by empathizing with people with very different value systems. While studies have not in general validated the value of expertise, they have validated the value of openmindedness and pluralism.

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MW, There is a long tradition, from Plato, of arguments to the effect that literature is harmful. Most philosophers who write on the topic don't care about consequences but about whether literature, qua literature, can be morally defective. One might think this is an idle question but the vehemence of those who demand that literature is autonomous of ethical criticism show that it is not. Literary critics who address this question tend--today--to be branded "reactionary" but a measured account of the topic is Roger Shattuck's book Forbidden Knowledge.

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Plato's irony was lost on many (including jj, apparently) for millenia, until Leo Strauss (among others) pointed it out in the last century.

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How reading Shakespeare and Wordsworth offer better therapy than self-help books
Researchers find 'complicated' prose can give 'rocket-boost' to brain
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER PUBLISHED: 09:05 GMT, 13 January 2013 | UPDATED: 11:52 GMT, 14 January 2013 He wrote that the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants. And it appears that simply reading those words by William Wordsworth prove his point. Reading challenging works by the greatest writers in the English language such as Shakespeare's King Lear and Philip Larkin's poetry provides a rocket-boost to the brain that cannot be matched by more simplistic modern books, research suggests.

The researchers used brain scans to study which areas of the brain were active when volunteers read complex passages by Shakespeare, Larkin and other great writers, then dumbed down versions of the same text.

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Scientists in Liverpool have found reading the works of Shakespeare (left) and poet Ted Hughes (right) can boost the brain and trigger further reading and moments of self-reflection, while giving a boost to morale Researchers at the University of Liverpool found the prose of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the like had a beneficial effect on the mind, providing a 'rocket-boost' to morale by catching the reader's attention and triggering moments of self-reflection. Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read pieces of classical English literature both in their original form and in a more dumbed-down, modern translation. And, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the experiment showed the more 'challenging' prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the pedestrian versions. The academics were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word, and noticed how it 'lit up' as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.

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The research found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory'

This reaction of the mind lasted longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear and encouraging further reading. The research also found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory', which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read. The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.

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Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre, said: 'Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain. 'The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.' The brain responses of 30 volunteers was monitored in the first part of the research as they read Shakespeare in its original and 'modern' form. In one example, volunteers read a line from King Lear, 'A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded', before reading the simpler. 'A father and a gracious aged man: him you have enraged'. Shakespeare's use of the adjective 'mad' as a verb caused a higher level of brain activity than the straightforward prose. The study went on to test how long the effect lasted. It found the 'peak' triggered by the unfamiliar word was sustained into the following phrases, suggesting the striking word had hooked the reader, with their mind primed for more attention.

A portrait of Charles Dickens at the age of 47, by William Powell Frith in 1859. Scientists will use his work in their studies of the human brain In the second phase of the study, the academics explored the extent to which poetry can provide therapeutic benefits. The next phase of the research is looking at the extent to which poetry can affect psychology and provide therapeutic benefit. using the work of, among others, including Wordsworth, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliot, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes.

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Volunteers' brains were scanned while reading four lines by Wordsworth: "She lived unknown and few could know, when Lucy ceased to be. But she is in her grave and oh, the difference to me." Four 'translated' lines were also provided, including, 'She lived a lonely life in the country, and nobody seems to know or care, but now she is dead, and I feel her loss'. The first version caused a greater degree of brain activity, lighting up not only the left part of the brain concerned with language, but also the right hemisphere that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion. Activity is this area of the brain suggest the poetry triggers 'reappraisal mechanisms', causing the reader to reflect and rethink their own experiences. 'Poetry is not just a matter of style. It is a matter of deep versions of experience that add the emotional and biographical to the cognitive,' said Prof Davis, who will present the findings at the North of England education conference in Sheffield this week.

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Areas in the right side of the brain were found to be more active for poetry (top) and less so for 'dumbed down' text (bottom) 'This is the argument for serious language in serious literature for serious human situations, instead of self-help books or the easy reads that merely reinforce predictable opinions and conventional self-images.'

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found reading the likes of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens could have a beneficial effect on morale Prof Davis hopes to scan the brains of volunteers reading Charles Dickens to test if revisions the writer made to his prose cause greater brain activity than the original text. He is also working with the charity The Reader Organisation to establish reading aloud groups in drop-in centres, care homes, libraries, schools and mother and toddler groups.

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