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The central belief in “moral imagination” that inspired Burke, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, and Anglo-American humanistic educators such as Irving Babbitt, John Erskine (“the moral obligation to be intelligent”), F. R. Leavis [pictured left], Lionel Trilling, and Northrop Frye is now only a memory.
The consequences for high school and college literary studies are massive. Modernist literary classics are no longer “ethical” or “humanistic,” the words themselves sounding nostalgic and ironic; they are about self-expression as the summum bonum—“songs of myself” everywhere. Radically relativistic and skeptical French Nietzscheanism swept the academic and “high-cultural” West from the 1960s on; and, despite the fall of European communism in 1990, various highly moralistic forms of Marxist analysis have also sifted down to the masses of university students, augmented by militant ideological teaching, faculty conformity, and subsidized university-press publishing. Of course, Marx and Nietzsche are utterly contradictory and antagonistic to one another, but several generations of their disciples have shown that they can live together in the minds of their partisans (an astonishing feat).
Now, one hundred thirty-five years after the onset of Nietzsche’s terminal madness in Turin, his histrionic literary hysteria, with its moralistic Marxist supplement, has become endemic. Radical subjectivism about knowledge and ethics nevertheless resorts habitually to outraged moral judgments, a paradox that Michael Polanyi called “moral inversion.” Our “high” academic and literary culture once thought of itself as “humanistic,” but that old literary humanism is now so remote from us as to remain only an archaeological phenomenon, what a contemporary Cambridge intellectual historian contemptuously calls “the nostalgic imagination."
If the preceding analysis is accurate—or at least plausible—the rapid decline in student interest in “humanities” and literature courses is made more explicable. A likely aspect of this decline is that students no longer see “pure fiction”—modernist, self-expressive, and aesthetic-imaginative—as particularly relevant, necessary, or credible. It is, after all, fiction. Add to this the emergence of AI, which is making the invigilation and evaluation of out-of-class writing assignments for their “originality” impossible. The central, “canonical,” “civilizing” role of high-school and college literary studies is increasingly only a memory of older generations. Twentieth-century critics as different as C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Philip Rieff, Russell Kirk, and Jacques Barzun all saw this coming and wrote illuminatingly about it.
One potentially viable solution is to ally high school literary studies more frequently and explicitly with history. Dickens’s novel about the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), is arguably the most popular novel in the English language. Tolstoy’s novel of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, War and Peace (1869), may be the greatest novel ever written. Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827), set in Lombardy during a great plague, retains incalculable culture-forming authority in Italy and beyond it. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1975) describes the Soviet Communist world of slave labor camps in what is perhaps the most important literary work of the last hundred years. Contemporary novelists such as the Englishman Piers Paul Read and the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo (1923–1996) have written excellent historical novels.
In his great short poem “Jordan (1),” George Herbert asks,
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Herbert’s rhetorical-philosophical question has both lapidary force and contemporary significance. “Pure” fiction has manifestly failed to provide any stable center for the educational curriculum in Western high schools and colleges. History itself is now thoroughly contested and resented by epistemological skeptics and educational “progressives.” But mature, undeformed persons in all walks of life who have not been “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” know that major historical events have objectively taken place and identifiable historical individuals have actually existed.
Thus historical fiction, grounded in real events and persons, holds a different kind of credibility and authority from “pure” fiction, and it also counteracts speculative skepticism about the grounds of knowledge. As a civilizing antidote to contemporary confusion, it offers a saving hope of renewal, not least in a return to the common sense that was the bread and wine of thoughtful individuals from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and the American founders to Dickens, Lincoln, George Orwell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Solzhenitsyn.
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from Modern Age https://modernagejournal.com/
M.D. Aeschliman taught at American, Swiss, and Italian universities for a half century. The new edition of his book The Restoration of Man was published in English in 2019 and in French in 2020 and he has edited paperback editions of novels by Charles Dickens and Malcolm Muggeridge.
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