The Education of the Soul: The Forsaken Ideal of Literary Study

Our discipline's present-day professional detachment from literature's personal, moral claim upon the reader undermines literary study's traditional place in a liberal arts or humanistic education. Many great books overtly intend the reader's metanoia: spiritual conversion or awakening accomplished by means of verbal power. Nowadays, though, it is fashionable to treat literary works as only artifacts, mere products of an age, or as no more than took of "hegemonic" cultural forces. But don't we fail as readers, teachers and critics when we refuse to engage The Divine Comedy or Walden, for example, on the authors' own stated terms?