The Power of Literature

"Really, what I love about literature is that it is constantly challenging us and provoking us and questioning us.

The power of that is that it then forces us to ask how our world is made, and if our world is made in ways that are unequal, it challenges us to imagine more equal ways of inhabiting our world.

That, to me, is power of literature.

It’s defamiliarizing. It’s estranging. It’s provoking. It’s disturbing. It teaches us to be just a little bit restless and a little bit uncertain about the world that we inhabit. There’s none of this, we’re going to be in harmony with the world around us. It’s a traumatic encounter. I think there’s value in that.

Its power and its powerlessness resides in its refusal to give us any guarantees about our world. In other words, we have to turn to literature in times of crisis, and yes, sometimes literature is used as a form of domination and not delusion.

But whatever literature offers us is always without any guarantee. It’s unverifiable. It is not going to give us a doctrine for how we should live our life because then it would be propaganda and we’d really be in trouble there."

From: http://oldgoldandblack.com/?p=21955



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