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NEWS
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Program
Descriptions
Classic Program
Senior Focus
Crossing Borders
Volume 6, Number 2 - Spring 2008
On the
Bookshelf
by Sarah Hirschman
Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha C. Nussbaum. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
In this short book, Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher who has written extensively on ethical questions and literature, examines the role of emotions generated by the reading of literary texts on public discourse.
As she mentions in her introduction, this book has been influenced by conversations with her students in the Law and Literature course she taught at the University of Chicago. These antecedents explain why the book is in part addressed to lawyers, judges, jurors as well as economists.
However, her thesis is far more general; she is interested in convincing us that the reading of literature has the capacity to broaden and sharpen our understanding of the world that we live in.
She mostly illustrates her arguments with examples from Hard Times by Charles Dickens, a novel with a message, but quotes also from other works and notably from Walt Whitman’s autobiographical poem “Song of Myself.” Chapters entitled “The Literary Imagination,” “Fancy,” “Rational Emotions” and “Poets as Judges” bring us gradually to see how readers who become emotionally involved in literary texts become intellectually sharper. She underlines how an emotional interest in individual, sometimes quite ordinary yet fictional characters, allows for a heightened ability to reflect critically about our own situation in the world. As she writes, “those works [lead] to fear, to grief, to pity, to anger, to joy and delight, even to passionate love.” But they also lead to questioning, to imagining, to an intellectual ability to wonder about a variety of social, cultural, and psychological situations.
So, she concludes, in order to better understand the complexity of our world and to have an influence on it as citizens, we need to read fiction and poetry.