Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap

In today’s classrooms, humanities educators have found themselves part of an escalating crisis of budget cuts led by current student trends valuing disciplines that provide clear, practical knowledge and promise to relatively lucrative careers. While academia’s approach to this crisis has been to promote the humanities as analogous to the work of the social sciences-as principles of compassionate wisdom or as critical practices providing political assessments of imaginative work-this volume invites a fresh strategy. Literature, Education, and Society argues that we must defend our differences from those practical disciplines by making manifest the importance to society of cultivating competing values. While practical disciplines tend to treat experiences as instances for which we learn to provide interpretive generalizations, making knowledge possible and helping us establish concrete programs for acting in accord with what we come to know, the arts have a very different relation to experience. Rather than generalize from particulars they emphasize how to appreciate particulars for qualities like sensitivity, intensity, and the capacity to solicit empathy. This volume discusses how the experience as category can provide insight into how works of art realize significant states of mind. Exploring the engagement with these educational choices, this volume argues the significant social dimensions and ethical implications that can guide the ways humanities can be embraced in current academia.