On the Relevance of Lit to Life

8/12/2019 On the Relevance of Lit to Life

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568 , WILNAA.J. MEIJER

Small wonder, then, that parents have often been advised to monitor and even to

censor their childrens reading matter. The more one is concerned with the transmission

of a certain moral code, the more enthusiasm for the development of the essentially

unbridled literary imagination will diminish. What children are allowed to read is

consequently judged according to its moral soundness. It is not uncommon for

childrens books to be especially written for the purpose of producing sound reading

matter for children. Narrative, in this case, serves as a vehicle for the moral message.

Such a moralistic approach runs the risk of turning childrens literature into something

insipid or mawkish, and this would be quite the opposite of true literature as in the kind

of novel recommended by Kundera, Nussbaum or Steiner. The relation between the

development of the literary imagination and moral development, and between literary

education and moral education, therefore, is a problematic one. Children are denied

entry into the boundless possibilities of the imagined (to use Steiners phrase) or into the

room where no-one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood

(Kunderas).

Often the dreaded moral and educational dangers are caricatured when tied up

with sex and violence. By the way, it is interesting to note that in former days books

were criticized for the very same reasons that modern media (TV, video, the Internet)

are today. A Dutch catholic advisory booklet from 1925, for example, suggests

censorship with regard to childrens reading.6 Amongst other things it criticizes a very

popular childrens book on American Indians by the German author Karl May for the

violence it contains: 2293 people get killed, by bullet, axe or knife, by gas, by drowning

or strangulation or by being buried alive. This old-time complaint about wild tales(indeed Indian tales is the Dutch word) does not differ all that much from recent

pedagogical fears about video-nasties such as Faces of Death, computer games such as

Carmageddon, movies like Pulp Fiction, or violence in TV-series. It is assumed that

witnessing aggression on the screen will make children aggressive, in other words: that

imitation will occur.

This reminds us of the classical issue of mimesis, mimesis being the idea that

literature imitates life or the real world.7 This issue has ancient rootsusually Plato

is mentioned to explain it, yet it is still very much alive today. Take a recent discussion

on present-day Dutch novels: debating whether these shouldnt reect present societyand current issues more than they do. Literary critics reproach authors for the lack of

street-noise in their work, e.g. that characters in their novels fail to reect the

multi-ethnic amalgam of the present Dutch population.8 Lack of street-noise is said

to render their work sterile and irrelevant. This discussion is just one aspect in the

ongoing debate on the moral and political signicance of literary books. It is assumed

that, in order to have such practical signicance, books should mirror the real world.

The moralist stance regarding childrens literature somehow reverses this (children

imitate their heroes, so the latter had better be morally sound), but it essentially shares

the idea of a mirroring or representational relation between literature and life.From the point of view of literary theory and hermeneutics, the idea of mimesis

as imitation or representation is however quite controversial Rather than duplicating


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The Relevance of Literature to Life, 569

Arnold, is paradigmatic and taken here as a case in the ongoing debate on the relevance

of literature to life and of the practical relevance of literary education.

THE CASE OF THELITERARYHUMANISTICTRADITION

Trilling, the famous American representative of the humanistic literary culture,

commented on the LeavisSnow debate in an essay published in 1962.9 He points out

that Snows Rede Lecture from 1959 should be placed against the background of

Matthew Arnolds Rede Lecture from 1882, entitled Literature and Science, though

Snow himself does not explicitly make this connection. In his Rede Lecture, Arnold

responded to Huxley who had disputed the value of literary humanistic studies as

advocated by Arnold in his famous Culture and Anarchyof 1867. Huxley already argued,

as Snow did again in 1959, that science is what the modern world requires, rather than

culture as conceived by Arnold, which entails getting to know the best that has been

said and thought by reading certain books. And so they argue for literature to give up

its privileged position in education. Because of its focus on the classics, the masterpieces

of the past, literary culture lags behind the progressive culture of science and technology

that determines the future.10

However, today, as much as they did then, the advocates of a literary humanistic

education argue11 that the ethical and political signicance of arts and literature lies not

in their reection of present society. On the contrary, All serious art, music and

literature is acriticalact. It is so () in the sense of Matthew Arnolds phrase: a criticism

of life. Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is acounter-statement to the world.12 Steiner is evidently heir to the literary-humanist

tradition: In the aesthetics of Schiller, in the proclamations of touchstones, of the

classical, of The Great Tradition by Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis respectively,

the real issues at stake are those of moral education and political values.13

Notwithstanding such positive statements, the Achilles heel of humanist literary

culture is indeed the risk of the world of art becoming a world apart, irrelevant to the

real world of action. Susan Sontag grumbled about it in an interview about the

prestigious Dutch Nexus conference on The Muses Farewell, in May 2000, in which she

participated together with George Steiner and Roger Scruton and many other intellec-tual celebrities. Actually, there hadnt been any debate at this conference, she says; a

single point of view had been defended again and again in the outdated terminology of

high culture as threatened by low culture. George Steiner had the nerve to say

that rock is a denial of all culture. Wake up George, rock is dead! It might have helped

the discussion if he had worried about hip hop and house and not about youth culture

of 20 years ago.14 This is indeed a serious criticism aimed at the liberal humanist who,

recalling Schiller and Arnold, had stated that art is about the criticism of life and that

it should be morally and politically relevant.

Interestingly, kindred literary intellectuals from a German language background aremore wary of drawing inferences from this danger inherent in arts and literature.

Wolfgang Iser 15 e g referring to both Schiller and Arnold at once the German and


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century. Art is giving rise to a realm of schone Schein (beautiful semblance; Schiller)

beyond the borders of reality. It is exactly this divisionat the time heralded as a new

humanistic idealfrom which a great many of the troubles began to ensue.16 The

imminent peril is of art amounting to a ight from reality instead of its critical

counter-statement. The liberal, liberating character of humanistic education

(Bildung macht frei), helping us to go beyond the present and the particular,17 ends

up becoming an escape to a promised landa biblical metaphor that Iser encounters

in Arnolds work. And so the promised land of Art is no more than a hope, whose

religious overtones resound with the desire for deliverance. And as the [nineteenth]

century wore on, autonomous Art revealed itself more and more overtly to be nothing

but a haven from the burdensome character of experience; it served to make people

forget that world in which they were so inextricably entangled.18

In trying to move away from the contemplative nature of the traditional enjoy-

ment of art, Iser emphasizes that negativity necessarily lies at the heart of works of art.

Art is not rst and foremost the world of beauty and harmony, the promised land where

one may reach tranquility. On the contrary, an essential negativity within texts triggers

activity on the part of the readers, their activity in appropriating a work of art, is

emphasized by hermeneutics (Ricoeur) as well as by reception aesthetics (Iser).

[W]ithout a reader to appropriate it, there is no world unfolded before the text. 19

Neither the idea that the literary work should reect the actual world of action, nor the

idea that art creates a different, elevated world, does justice to that dialectic. A literary

text can be compared to a musical score: the work, be it a song or a symphony, is not

to be identied with the set of marks on paper, it is only there when interpreted andperformed, when realized.

The idea of mimesis, of the text mirroring the world, is too static. Perhaps it is too

much part and parcel of the ahistorical discourse of reality-versus-appearance (Sein

versus Schein, recall Schillers schone Schein) to capture the activity of the reader

and to view reading as a process that is historical through and through. Instead of the

text representing the world, rather the unending interplay of the world of the text and

the world of readers should be put to the fore.20

RICOEUR:THE WORLD OF THE TEXT AND THE WORLD OF THEREADER

Let us now take a closer look at Ricoeurs statement: without a reader to

appropriate it, there is no world unfolded before the text.21 Certainly, to read is to

follow the text, word by word, page by page, from beginning to end, so that we can

say that the text is the leading subject whereas the reader has to follow. 22 However,

when we turn to aesthetics, to the readers active part in realizing the work, that

characteristic passivity is not ignored. Aesthetics is about aisthesis or perception, or, in

Ricoeurs words, the readers being-affected. This being-affected has the note-

worthy quality of combining in an experience of a particular type passivity and activity,which allows us to consider as the reception of a text the very action of reading it.23

It is the text itself that summons the readers activity; in other words it is activity in


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Narrative (third volume), Ricoeur follows Isers analysis of the reading process on that

score. I will dwell on that later. For the moment it is enough to realize that it is only

in this interplay between text and reader that a world is disclosed before the text. It is

only when recontextualized in the world of the reader that the world of the text comes

into being.

Apart from their being read, texts are characteristically decontextualized. In his essay

What is a text?, Ricoeur emphasizes that texts are not a xation of speech and that

reading is not an instance of dialogue.24 He introduces the concept of distanciation to

mark the autonomy of the text as to speech and dialogue. The text is emancipated, rst,

from the intentions of its author, second, from the original readership the author may

have had in mind while writing, and, third, from the cultural and historical context of

the original author and readers. Texts are essentially decontextualized by this threefold

distanciation. The meaning of a literary text should neither be sought in the authors

intentions, nor in the social or cultural context from which the text originated. In this

respect the text can be said to be autonomous. The autonomy of the text already

contains the possibility that what Gadamer calls the matter of the text may escape from

the nite intentional horizon of its author; in other words (), the world of the text

may explode the world of the author.25 And so reference to the real world of origin

is not a crucial factor in determining the texts meaning. This abolition of a rst order

reference effected by literary ction is the condition of a second order reference to a

world before the text. And that is where the readers activity comes in.

Reading is fullling the (second order, non-ostensive) reference of the text, it

entails recontextualizing the text. The reader projects his own possibilities into the text,or, put differently, receives new ways of being from the text, imaginative variations.

For what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world which I could inhabit.26

Understanding a literary text means appropriating the world of the text and that means

understanding oneself in front of the text, in the world it proposes. It is not a

question of imposing upon the text our nite capacity of understanding, but of exposing

ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the

proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.27

Paradoxically therefore, appropriation entails a letting-go, a relinquishment.28 It has

the character of play, says Ricoeur, again following Gadamer, in which subjectivityforgets itself. The directions that the text opens up for thought are followed, in a

characteristic back and forth (hin und her: to and fro) movement. The special blend of

activity and passivity already mentioned as characteristic of reading matches this

playfulness.

From this hermeneutical stance we can now abandon the idea that, in order to be

relevant to the world of today, literary texts themselves ought somehow to reect that

world. In the next section it will, furthermore, be emphasized, together with Iser, that

what the text leaves unsaid is just as important as what it does say.

ISER: REALIZATION OF THE IMAGINARY AND UN-REALIZATION OF THE REAL


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in which the author is not explicit as to the mans hair color. For reasons of probability

one should imagine the man to be grey rather than raven-haired. Ingarden himself

admitted to the banality of this example, but Iser notices that the examples Ingarden

gives are all banal and that they always apparently concern illusions of concrete visual

perception. According to Iser the idea of indeterminacy should therefore be taken to be

more radical than Ingarden himself did. Its merit is that it broke away from the

traditional assumption of the work of art as mere representation, in other words: as

mimesis. Indeterminacy is shown to be essential in texts: the things not said

(Leerstellen or blanks) essentially trigger activity on the part of the reader. Instead of

a text encompassing everything required for understanding, the interaction between text

and reader is placed at the center. There are in fact two basic structures of

indeterminacy in the textblanks, and negations. These are essential conditions of

communication, for they set in motion the interaction that takes place between text and

reader, and to a certain extent they also regulate it.29

Ingardens examples all involve incomplete descriptions of intentional objects. All

the reader has to do is to complete the image. Rather than this need for completion,

Iser emphasizes the need for combination as brought about by all kinds of indeter-

minacy that interrupt the good continuation of texts. One of his examples is the

Dickens serial novel: Readers in the nineteenth century underwent an experience

which is very revealing in our present context: they often found a novel read in

installments to be better than the very same novel in book form. 30 Generally, the story

is interrupted at a tense moment; we would call that a cliff-hanger today. Suspense

arouses activity in the reader as (s)he wonders what will happen next and what willbecome of a certain character? The interruption and consequent prolongation of

tension is the basic function of the cut. The result is that we try to imagine how the

story will unfold, and in this way we heighten our own participation in the course of

events. Dickens was a master of the technique; his readers became his co-authors. 31

The liveliness of the story is almost created by the reader. (S)he enters into the lives of

the characters and experiences their doubts concerning their unknown and precarious

future as a pressing ignorance of her or his own. There are other literary means of

achieving the same kind of suspense or pauses in the text. A new chapter in a novel

may, for example, start an entirely new history with new characters. [T]he reader isforced to try to nd connections between the hitherto familiar story and the new,

unforeseeable situations. He is faced with a whole network of possibilities, and thus

begins himself to formulate missing links.32 Blanks or cuts in the text interrupt

continuity, thwart the horizon of expectation that the reader has built up so far, and

trigger, again and again, the readers activity of constituting coherence and consistency,

in other words: poetic closure.33

This also explains why rereading yields alternative readings of one and the same

text. It is due to the texts indeterminacies that there is room for change of vision. The

text itself has not changed, but the world of the reader has, and from that vantage pointthe world of the work which is constituted in the process of reading may change. In

other words the way in which the blanks are lled has changed This indeed shows once


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elements of their own world-view come into play and are playfully manipulated.

Experienced readers will realize that alternative readings are possible and even that,

ultimately, all closure, in reading as well as in life, is at odds with the unavoidable

openness of the future and therefore with historicity. And so we arrive at Isers literary

anthropology, which he developed on the basis of his reader response theory.35 It is in

line with the philosophical anthropology of Helmut Plener, among others, which

emphasizes human openness, plasticity and historicity. Human beings are not simply

what they are, they keep on transcending their present ways of being, thus creating new

forms of existence. Literary ction ts in nicely here.

Iser turns away from the common, but supercial opposition between reality and

ction in the case of literary ction and introduces the verb ngieren (to ctionalize)

to replace the substantive ction. This again emphasizes the readers activity. Acts of

ctionalization form one pole of the triad that substitutes the realityction opposition.

The other two poles are the real and the imaginary. Iser uses these substantivated

forms of the adjectives rather than the substantives reality and imagination, in order

to avoid common misunderstandings pertaining to the opposition of reality and

ction.36 The two shouldnt be seen to be opposed, as there is a lot of reality in

ction. As soon as elements of reality are placed in the context of literary ction,

however, they are bracketed (eingeklammert, in Klammern gesetzt). As part of the

story or the ctional scene they become unreal. The reader has to suspend his

naturliche Einstellung (natural attitude) towards them and allow them to take on

new meaning and signicance in the world of the text. The real is not there for its own

sake as a matter of hard and undeniable fact, rather it is staged, made part of a certainInszenierung oder Betrachtung.37 The act of ctionalization therefore is die

Irrealisierung von Realem as much as it is the Realwerden von Imaginarem:38 the

becoming unreal of the real (un-realization of the real) as much as the realization of

the imaginary.

The real is played with in the world of the text as constituted in reading. The real

is transcended and transgressed. It is opened up towards the possible. That is what

literary texts can do to the world of their readers. It is by the imaginative reguration

of the world of the reader that the practical or moral signicance of literature may be

soughtwhich is quite the opposite to what is assumed by the moralist approach toliterature, especially childrens literature.

STREET-NOISE AND THECLASSICS

One of the recurrent problems in literary education is that of the canon.39 One

question asks which books should make up the canon and how much variation should

be allowed for. Another question, and this is the one that concerns us in this nal

section, is whether the classics, whatever way they are identied, form suitable readingmatter for literary education classes. The well-known debate in the United States on

Great Books Courses in undergraduate education is an example here 40 Demands are


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student population (blacks, women, homosexuals). The present, practical relevance and

signicance of the classics is at stake. Why read the classics?

In the foregoing discussion we have refuted the idea of mimesis, which associates

the relevance of literature with its mirroring the current world. The criticism of the

canon just mentioned would again seem to presuppose the idea of mimesis. The lesson

we have drawn from Iser and Ricoeur is that interaction between the world of the text

and the world of the reader is an essential feature of reading, whereas the idea of the

text itself mirroring reality is too unhistorical and too static. As soon as we leave this

concept of mimesis behind us, the problem of the canon seems to evaporate. Reading

is a matter of the interaction between two worlds, therefore it is perfectly possible for

old-time classics to speak to todays readers. Calvinos brilliant little essay Why Read

the Classics? demonstrates this point beautifully.41

Let us return to the matter of street noise as presented at the end of the rst

section of this article: the assumption that literary books, novels, should somehow

reect their cultural and historical context in order to contribute to topical debates and

issues. Their signicance for the present world is assumed to lie in a direct reection

of that world. In that case it would be a sheer impossibility for the classics, as

masterpieces of the past, to be currently signicant. According to Calvino, however,

it is precisely because of their distance from the current world that the classics gain their

signicance. A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment

to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is

something we cannot do without.42 I assume we are justied in conceiving this

background noise, or indeed street-noise, as part of the world of the reader, howeverit got there: from her or his own latest experience, from the latest news or from the

latest novel. It is hard to imagine a reader who devotes her or his reading time

exclusively to the classics, who would never be tempted by the latest novel or

sociological investigation43 and never read a newspaper. More true to life would be the

image of a reader who reads classics as well as such other reading matter. It is precisely

in this combination that the current relevance of reading the classics becomes manifest.

The latest news may well be banal or mortifying, but nonetheless remains a point from

which to stand and look both backward and forward. To be able to read the classics,

you have to know from where you are reading them; otherwise both the book andthe reader will be lost in a timeless cloud. This, then, is the reason why the greatest

yield from reading the classics will be obtained by someone who knows how to

alternate them with the proper dose of current affairs.44

So Calvino gives a very clear idea about reading as recontextualizationto use

Ricoeurs term. The work speaks to me, as a reader, in my present context. I

experience its signicance and vitality in what it has to say to me, here and now. That

very experience revivies the works signicance, which therefore is yet again lasting.

The meaning and truth of works of art are a historical matterthe classics are no

exception. The interaction of two worlds, the world of the reader and the world of thetext, is essential. Perhaps interplay is the better word, because of the back and forth

movement that hints at the endlessness of reading and rereading


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underprivileged, black students, 1416 years of age, in special education at an urban

public school in Chicagos black ghetto, read and discuss Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet

in about ten classroom sessions over a period of 12 weeks.46 Haroutunion-Gordon

describes various conversations with these students. She observes that they did succeed

in discussing genuine issues in connection with Romeo and Juliet. Although their remarks

seemed random and arbitrary at times, the questions they explore are ones not

answered denitively in the texts.47 By its blanks and indeterminacies, to apply

Isers terminology to this case, the text summoned the students to draw on their own

life-experience. They were not very literate students, but they were skillfully stimulated

by Haroutunion-Gordon in the reading and subsequent discussion sessions. She was

sometimes surprised by the questions that Shakespeares play evoked in these particular

students. For example, they did not hesitate to express their opinions of Shakespeares

view of premarital sex,48 which provoked an evaluative discussion on the acceptability

of sex before marriage, and if so, under what circumstances? And as to the famous

balcony scene in which Romeo and Juliet, having declared their love to one another,

make plans to unite in matrimony, Colette, one of the students, wonders: Why was

Juliet so eager to get married?49 A related question engages the entire group of students

a little later: The new issueWhat will happen to the couple if they sneak off and get

married?gains intensity when Colette projects herself into the role of a father whose

daughter elopes with a man. I would kill him, she declares.50 Haroutunion-Gordon

suggests that this reading is inspired by her own experience of seeing fathers respond.

Whereas another student, James, argues that the lovers will be free if they run off, and

suggests that the father would be less upset to know after the fact than before, Coletteinsists that it would be worse to tell Capulet after the fact.

Such details illustrate reading as an interaction between the world of the text and

the world of the reader. It is not that the students have come to agree with

Shakespeare, or even that they have properly understood the play, Haroutunion-

Gordon admits. Rather, in reading and discussing it, they have drawn on their personal

experience to interpret texts; and the text, then, has become a basis for reecting on

lifes experiences.51 In other words: their life experience went into their reading the

Shakespearean classic, and at the very same time this literature was experienced as

relevant to their lives.

NOTES

1. M. C. Nussbaum,Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life(Boston: Beacon Press,1995), 1.

2. G. Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).3. M. Kundera, De kunst van de roman (Baarn: Ambo, 1987) (originally in French: Lart du

roman, 1986); M. Kundera, Verraden testamenten (Baarn: Ambo, 1994) (originally in French:Les testaments trahis, 1993).

4. Kundera, De kunst van de roman, 121.5. Steiner, Real Presences, 11.6. J. Dane, Lectuur van Satan. Censuur en zelfcensuur in calvinistisch Nederland, Jaarboek


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8. A. Ramdas, Niemand heeft oog voor het vreemde, NRC Handelsblad(14 March 1997):29.

9. The LeavisSnow Controversy, reprinted in L. Trilling, Beyond Culture. Essays onLiterature and Learning(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 12654.

10. See A. Stinner, Science, Humanities, and SocietyThe SnowLeavis Controversy,

Interchange20 (1989): 1623 at 17.11. See W. A. J. Meijer, Paradigmas Literarios de la Educacion Human7stica: Una Tradici onViva, Nueva Revista de Pol7tica, Cultura y Arte71 (2000): 99114.

12. Steiner, Real Presences, 11.13. Ibid., 80.14. Susan Sontag in an interview with Pieter Steinz, NRC Handelsblad (2 June 2000): 21. (By

the way, 40 years ago would have been more accurate.)15. Iser is professor at the University of Konstanz and in the US. His work is well known in

the US, more than the work of his Konstanzer colleague Jau on reception aesthetics thatin actual fact inspired Iser [cf. Thomas article in the special issue on Isers writings: B.Thomas, Restaging the Reception of Isers Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions

of the Aesthetic, New Literary History 31 (2000): 1343].16. W. Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore/London: The

John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 201.17. I borrow Baileys unexcelled expression here. In the book with this title [C. Bailey,Beyond

the Present and the Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1984)] he advocates the idea of liberal education as outlined by R. S. Peters, that in defenseof the breadth of liberal education includes other domains apart from the arts and thehumanities. For a classical statement of the position, see P. H. Hirst and R. S. Peters, TheLogic of Education (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1977).

18. Iser, Prospecting, 202.

19. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Volume 3 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press,1988), 164.20. I could, following Ricoeur, have kept the term mimesis in the hermeneutical context

where reading and texts are understood in their essential historicity. Ricoeur distinguishes,in his Time and Narrative, three forms of mimesis: preguration, conguration andreguration. The very wording already hints at the action-character of this concept ofmimesis. Indeed, throughout the hermeneutical work of Ricoeur the activity of the readerand the phenomenon of recontextualization are of central importance. It turned out to beperfectly possible, however, to make use of Ricoeurs ideas on the interplay between theworld of the reader and the world of the text without using the term mimesis. This Ipreferred.

21. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 164.22. This is part of what is learnt at the very beginning, in the so-called emergent literacy of

infants (cf. W. A. J. Meijer, The Laboratory of the Probable. Literacy and the Humanities,Paper presented at the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values, July 2000,

Jerusalem).23. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 167.24. P. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145.25. Ibid., 139.26. Ibid., 142.27. Ibid., 143.28. Ibid., 191.29. W. Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London/Henley: Routledge &


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33. See Meijer, The Laboratory of the Probable.34. Iser, Prospecting, 10.35. Ibid.; W. Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginare. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt

a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991).36. And for Iser with this opposition the traditional idea of mimesis (as representation of reality

in works of art) is indeed under discussion as well. Cf. the epilogue Mimesis undPerformanz in Ibid., 481.37. Ibid., 38.38. Ibid., 23.39. W. A. J. Meijer, Book and School: On Literacy and General Education, Interchange 26

(1995): 117; R. Soetaert and L. Top, eds, Een beeld van belezenheid. Over culturelegeletterdheid (Den Haag: Nederlandse Taalunie/SDU, 1996).

40. See Meijer, Paradigmas Literarios de la Educacion Human7stica.41. I. Calvino, The Literature Machine (London: Vintage, 1997), 125.42. Ibid., 132.43. Ibid., 131.

44. Ibid., 1312.45. S. Haroutunion-Gordon, Turning the Soul. Teaching through Conversation in the High School

(Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).46. Haroutunion-Gordon compares these Belden students to the Chalmer students that she

also worked with on the same Shakespearean: sophomores at a private, racially integratedschool in metropolitan Chicago. It would carry us too far in the present context to discussthis whole enterprise [see W. A. J. Meijer, Review Article: Sophie Haroutunion-GordonsTurning the Soul, Studies in Philosophy and Education 13 (1994): 7783].

47. Haroutunion-Gordon, Turning the Soul, 85.48. Ibid., 135.49. Ibid., 101.50. Ibid., 105.51. Ibid., 135.


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On the Relevance of Lit to Life