Values of Literature ed. by Hanna Meretoja et. al. (review)

Why read literature? Does literature matter, and what can it do? These perennial questions find new urgency here amid the humanities' current 'crisis' and literary studies' ethical, narrative, cognitive, and affective turns. This collection's plural responses reflect its ambitious core premise: we must engage in debates on literature's value(s) while thinking beyond narrow critical approaches. A comprehensive Introduction firstly details the project's stakes and then surveys ethical criticism's key strands since its resurgence in the 1980s. Of the following three sections, the first is the longest and, to my mind, the most compelling. Part One's chapters take up Nussbaum's defence of literature as proposing positive exempla and inspiring empathetic character identification. Contra this overly 'psychological, normative, and ahistorical' (p. 43) account of literature's value, Part One underscores the inextricability of aesthetics and ethics, as well as literature's encouragement of openness to 'what is new, unknown, and unsettling' (p. 10). Hanna Meretoja's hermeneutic reading emphasizes literature as 'a realm of imagining the possible' informing understanding of our own world (p. 26). For Angela Locatelli, studying King Lear and A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley's postmodern reworking of Shakespeare's tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1991), literature promotes 'dialogic reading' and 'meta-ethical' awareness of the construction of values (p. 47). For Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky's 'abdication' of an 'authorial/authoritative' gaze as performative ethics (pp. 73, 72). Finally, Colin Davis brings out Jorge Semprún's ambivalence regarding literature's power, asserting that Le Grand Voyage (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) 'anticipates a future crisis' in the author's Marxism (p. 87). Part Two then examines cognitive, affective, and social values, while still stressing how form shapes meaning and value; it therefore offers a corrective to recent neuroscientific and cognitive approaches to literature. Informed by narratology, Vera Nünning questions how literary devices develop affective and cognitive perspective-taking abilities, and Ansgar Nünning investigates how George Eliot's aesthetic theory sheds light on the conception and dissemination of affective and cognitive values in Victorian realism. Adopting a 'value-pluralist' perspective (p. 137), Saija Isomaa then contends that particular genres 'engage with the moral values, norms, and emotions that are constitutive of a community' (p. 17). Part Three considers the social construction of literary value(s), as when Kristina Malmio draws on Bourdieu to argue that literary debates, like those surrounding 1920s Finland-Swedish minority literature, produce value while exposing 'tacit aesthetic and social assumptions' (p. 154). By analysing empathy and exclusion in Andrew Macdonald's The Turner Diaries (Hillsboro: National Vanguard Books, 1978), a neo-Nazi fiction that inspired real terrorism, Tero Eljas Vanhanen demonstrates how we can indeed 'do wrong with fiction' (p. 172). Lastly, in a provocative conclusion, Magnus Persson critiques the assumptions underpinning art-of-reading texts (Harold Bloom), educational policy (in Sweden), and bibliotherapy (Alain de Botton). Critically examining 'the literature myth' of the inherent value of 'good' literature (as pitted against 'bad' media culture) (p. 189), Persson calls for new defences of literature that account for 'the cultural heterogeneity and […] new media ecology of our time' (p. 202). This volume champions literature as, in Ricœur's words, a 'laboratory' for imagining, negotiating, and transforming values (Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 194; quoted on p. 41). True to its subject, it offers a valuable contribution to literary studies for scholars and graduate students alike.