Reading: The Globe in Literature Symposium

The Novel and the Globe Reading

I found this reading extremely fruitful in talking about the craft of writing and its importance in global history as well as academia. The professors who presented their work were literary critics, as opposed to writers, but they have interesting ideas about the novel and how we grapple with narratives as students of History and English.

Professor Landy brought up an interesting theory about how the novel and literature teach us how to think, rather than telling us what to think. I will revisit this later when I talk about the defense of the humanities as a field, which was discussed by another professor.  What I found the most interesting about his talk was that he claimed Plato was a repressed novelist. Landy commented that the comedy at that time was the closest written form to the novel; Plato was forced to navigate the stage-play genre, used by comedy, in order to teach the lessons that he wanted to impart on his readers. In his play Gorgias, Plato, according to Landy, is teaching the reader to differentiate between good and bad arguments. I am reporting a mere summary of another summary about Professor Landy’s book, but what he argued was that Plato invented the use of literature as a means of teaching the reader how to think and that the novel adopted this form of discourse later on.

Professor Palumbo-Liu discussed how his book was written in the defense of the study of literature. He discussed how the study of humanities was a constant conversation with texts and did not end with a definitive answer. To this end, he argued that teaching the humanities is not about giving a definitive answer to students but provoking new discussions about texts among students and to force students to look at the world in new ways. Professor Palumbo-Liu recalled a class in which his student gave him negative reviews because they felt that they could not relate to the books he assigned; these books were often about immigrants. He told us that while students are resistant to this method, he actually assigns these books because his students will not relate to them; further, he argued that the point of reading books was not to read about someone who is just like you, but to read about someone who is not like you to try and see the world through their eyes. I found this argument interesting because, as a student, I have read books that I do not relate to because of the characters or the setting. There are cases where I learned more about another culture by reading about someone completely different from me, and other times where I felt alienated and disinterested. Professor Palumbo-Liu changed and reaffirmed how I read novels and what I take away from reading about someone I don’t relate to; I’ve started to look at some of the books I’ve read recently and try to pull meaning from where I found things confusing or alienating. Jane Austen, I would say, is a particularly good case because after reading three of her novels, I’ve finally learned to appreciate them for the differences and the similarities that they have to our time, which is why I think that people still read them.