Literary Theory on Acid

This essay argues for the value of psychedelic experience as a framework for amplifying the social and political impacts of literature on the affective lives of readers and viewers. Psychedelics are chemical compounds that induce a hypersaturated experience of life that represents facets of the world to us in unfamiliar, intensified form. Neurochemical studies of the psychedelically "tripping" brain suggest that the experience can have wide-reaching, long-term positive outcomes including the expansion of one's sensory apprehension of the world, a stronger ability to grapple with life's contingency and human mortality, and the mitigation of depression, anxiety, and addiction. The author identifies several crucial ways in which literary criticism and pedagogy's enhancement of cultural meaning making dovetails with the best aspects of psychedelic states, including the activation of readers' and students' aesthetic sensibilities. A psychedelically inflected criticism aims to achieve the psychedelic experience's "blossoming of mental states" by revitalizing the literary text as a site for exploring, refining, and retuning the sensorium, thereby enriching one's perceptual and imaginative capacities. The author unpacks how the insights of psychedelic experiences can shape distinct pedagogical and interpretative practices that respond to our current global political crises. This can potentially revivify the therapeutic value of the humanities as an institution invested in honing the creative and ethical faculties of generations of youth while attending to their long-term affective well-being.