Liberal Arts, Literary Studies, and Liberal Democracy

To teach, to delight, and to move to action—this is the goal of all poetry that matters. That this tripartite aim belonged to poetry, what we might now call literary fiction, was a commonplace in Renaissance thinking and clearly set down in Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, a work that marks the beginning of the English tradition of literary textual criticism. In the Renaissance, just as in the Middle Ages that preceded it, Grammar was conceived as an art not only of reading and writing, but as an art of ethical living as well. The study of literature, in other words, was traditionally directed, at least in part, towards practical action and—conditioned by its early flourishing in the Athenian polis—political participation. Consistent with this orientation of literary study, classical conceptions of the liberal arts held that they were essential for every free person entitled to informed participation in civic life. In this connection, the “Liberal” in “Liberal Arts” is etymologically related to the Latin “liberalis” an adjective that means “befitting a free person.”

The discipline of literature is—and has been from the beginning of the written tradition that has come down to us from the ancient Greeks—intimately concerned with ethical action. Emerging from this first discipline, the liberal arts have been and continue to be a formative instrument of liberal democracy. For all this, modern literary study often seems to lack the practical ethical impulse suggested by poetry’s third traditional aim, the movement to action. The apparent lack of critical concern, in contemporary academia, with the practical ethical and intentional dimension of literature may be due to the exclusionary nature of modern literary canons and to the nature of “literature”, “literary criticism”, and “literary studies” as a relatively recent and as an arbitrarily and narrowly demarcated disciplinary construct.

Within the discipline of English Literature, “literature” is separated from key areas of writing and discourse even in the case of the most highly acclaimed literary figures. As an example of this, very little time is spent within literary curricula upon the political pamphleteering of Milton or, for that matter, upon the tremendous store of interpretive works of the early Church Fathers, the Medieval Doctors, and the Renaissance theologians who followed them in a cultural Reformation empowered precisely by humanist text-critical practices. The unofficial scope of literary studies is narrowed in part through a prioritizing of scriptum over voluntas, that is, of the signification of words over the intention of authors. For the modern literary critical tradition follows upon one particular branch of the art of rhetoric which, as Kathy Eden instructs us, characterizes meaning differently in its different sections: “under invention as intentionality–what moral and legal agents mean to do or say–and under elocution as signification–what words mean” (10, 11).

The exclusionary opposition manifest in literary criticism’s priority of signification over intention reflects a “profound division fundamental to the [classical] treatment of rhetorical material–a division reflected… in the traditional separation in the manuals of matters of proof (Gr. pistis, Lat. probatio) from matters of style (Gr. lexis, Lat. elocutio).” As it appears in the classical rhetorical tradition, this was an essential division within an integral body of understanding–a division that manifested, as it happens, a priority entirely contrary to that demonstrated in modern literary critical studies: “Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the anonymous Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria… all turn to matters of style only after treating matters of proof, a priority reflected equally in the traditional ordering of the five rhetorical partes, with invention in first place and elocution [style] in third” (Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition 10,11). By accepting the tailoring of literary critical concerns such that they align with elocutio–the part of rhetoric concerned with the style of oratorical/textual delivery, the discipline of literary studies has gradually lost sight of its traditional and practical relationship to moral philosophy or ethics.

It is of great personal and societal benefit to restore–first in our understanding and eventually in the institutions that belatedly reflect our understanding–he full scope of inquiry and relevance proper to the traditional study of bonae litterae or good letters to the modern study of literature. Towards this end and taking, as it were, our cue from the ancient Roman orators and the rhetorical tradition they consolidated, we will do well to expand the unofficial canon of our literary study to include genres of texts all too often neglected within the modern discipline of English literature. We must begin to focus critical attention upon the authoritative texts of international human rights treaties, resolutions and other instruments, as well as upon the genre of reports, opinions, commentaries, and recommendations which revolve around these crucial articulations of the rights and freedoms essential to liberal democracy. The values and judgments these writings express emerge from and elaborate the utopian premise that all people must have the opportunity to enjoy and take active responsibility for the things befitting a free person. They speak to the heart of liberal democracy, to the heart of our liberal arts education, and to the heart of the practical, ethical potential of literary studies.  Such texts are both exemplary products of the liberal arts education, and the means by which the project of liberal arts and liberal democracy may be clarified, illustrated, and defended.

Eliot has reminded us already, “in our end is our beginning”. The goal of our labours towards literary understanding lies in the original and felicitous impulse of poetry: to teach, to delight, and to move to action.