It seems to me fairly self-evident that much of impact literature makes on a reader depends on the reader themself. More specifically, it appears to be the case that mental imagery plays a significant role in how literary narratives are received and remembered by readers. For people with reduced mental imagery, I suspect that much of the literature that relies heavily on it is, almost literally, rather less memorable.
I am maddeningly unable to recite the whole of the introduction to 80s Monkey. "The name of the egg was Thought. With our thoughts said the Buddha we make(?) the world. Aeons changed and passed(?) er hem er hem The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!!"
I also came across Li Qingzhao earlier this year. I liked her but the way Chinese poetry is translated into twenty-first century English free verse I don't know that I could tell it from Du Fu except where he or she are clearly speaking as a man or woman. I don't know if that's my unfamiliarity with the conventions of Chinese poetry or the translations or so on?
I remember different fragments, but this is the whole intro:
In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order, but the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown. The four worlds formed again and yet again, as endless aeons wheeled and passed. Time and the pure essences of Heaven, the moisture of the Earth, the powers of the Sun and the Moon all worked upon a certain rock old as creation, and it became magically fertile. That first egg was named Thought. Tathagata Buddha, the father Buddha said "With our thoughts, we make the world." Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it then came a stone monkey... The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!
There was a fair amount of cultural appropriation going on. It was a Japanese production of the Chinese novel Journey to the West (as already mentioned) about a pilgrimage to India and enlightenment, dubbed with a variety of dodgy accents and broadcast in a number of countries around the world.
In short I can't recall the translation. As for our conversation, it was mostly recommending various authors in our own traditions to each other, and being delighted to find some were already familiar to the other.
I believe Hugo gave the spot to Rabelais. (Although as I understand it Hugo would only have disagreed with people putting him on the top spot as much as modesty absolutely required.)
Dipping back into Chinese literature, I am familiar, at least by name, with Dream of the Red Chamber. It is frequently referenced in the Inspector Chen mysteries by Qiu Xiaolong, with respect and acknowledgement of it being a great classic of Chinese literature.
The Tale of Genji is on my TBR shelf waiting for a time when I feel up to tackling the fact that everybody has five or six titles and the author keeps using different ones to refer to them. It makes me understand a little better how other people apparently feel about Russian names.
I think it's worth reflecting on what Shakespeare contributed in literary terms - and no, I don't think of him as a 'philosopher' as such. Yet he did shape the way we speak to a certain extent. He coined new words, and added phrases to the lexicon.
In literary terms, as well as marvellous blank verse (which he didn't invent of course), I think it is fair to say that his characters have greater psychological depth than most characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
That isn't to say that all the other plays were wooden. Some cracking plays around at that time, as well as some turkeys.
We have to disaggregate Shakespeare from the 19th century 'Bardolatry' though. That cast a long shadow.
Did he shape the way we think?
I read an interesting article recently, can't remember where, about how and why the fledgling USA embraced Shakespeare so wholeheartedly. Themes from Julius Caesar, King Lear and so on fed into the new Republic's vision of itself.
Shakespeare is big in Russia too, apparently. I would imagine for different reasons.
It's a cliche I know, but Russian literature seems to have gone for the big themes - sin, redemption, love, death (cue Woody Allen), war ...
I'm told the Chinese have a soft spot for Shakespeare too. I know they like Dickens.
You haven't experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon, of course.
Is it necessary to shape the way people think, in order to be a great writer?
I'm serious. Could it be enough, for example, to be simply a supremely good provider of entertainment? Or a wonderful observer of character (without necessarily making pronouncements on what you observe)?
And if you think it IS necessary to shape the way people think (that is, to affect their philosophy, etc.), must you do it intentionally--that is, with philosophy aforethought? Or could you do it as a byproduct of some other effort--such as the effort to portray the piece of the world around you accurately?
We don't expect sculptures to change the way people think before we will call them great pieces of art (though of course they may). I think it must be possible to have writing that is similar.
I would add Mary Wollstonecraft to the list of influential writers, she was one of the earliest feminist writers and her works were influential on nineteenth century authors such as Austen and Eliot and the suffrage movement. Yet for some reason she is often overlooked.
Perhaps she's been overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Frankenstein?
Personally, if someone wants to change the way I think I want them to do it explicitly in philosophical, scientific or theological works, not through fiction. I don't mind changing my thinking based on fiction, but that feels like my domain rather than the author's.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been mentioned but Mary Wollstonecraft would fit into the discussion of influential writers as she was a founding feminist philosopher (she was also a novelist and letter writer). I suspect the reason she is overlooked is because she is a female philosopher and her writing is feminist. I would be interested to know many people on this thread have read her work.
Personally, if someone wants to change the way I think I want them to do it explicitly in philosophical, scientific or theological works, not through fiction. I don't mind changing my thinking based on fiction, but that feels like my domain rather than the author's.
My experience is that human thinking is a long way from being under our individual intentional control to this degree. My thinking has been influenced significantly by various works of fiction that I have read, even if I didn't read them with that aim in mind. On a fairly basic level, I spend time thinking about what I have read - and some of those thoughts are more consequential than others.
It strikes me that many people who have written for children do so with the intention of addressing topics that they consider to be important or valuable (including the importance of values).
At this point, it's kind of traditional to mention C S Lewis, so I will.
Personally, if someone wants to change the way I think I want them to do it explicitly in philosophical, scientific or theological works, not through fiction. I don't mind changing my thinking based on fiction, but that feels like my domain rather than the author's.
I guess I don’t see it in terms of an author wanting to change the way I think, per se. I see it in terms of an author wanting to offer a certain perspective, perhaps even a new perspective. What I do with my exposure to that perspective is up to me.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been mentioned but Mary Wollstonecraft would fit into the discussion of influential writers as she was a founding feminist philosopher (she was also a novelist and letter writer). I suspect the reason she is overlooked is because she is a female philosopher and her writing is feminist. I would be interested to know many people on this thread have read her work.
A bit.
She came up when I was at university in the early '80s.
I suspect she is on more syllabuses (syllabi?) more now than she was then.
Personally, if someone wants to change the way I think I want them to do it explicitly in philosophical, scientific or theological works, not through fiction. I don't mind changing my thinking based on fiction, but that feels like my domain rather than the author's.
I agree with @Nick Tamen's response to this but I'm going to wonder aloud here ...
I know you are a big Tolkein fan, @KarlLB. Would you say that reading Tolkein has 'shaped' the way you think and respond to things?
Might be a difficult question to answer as literature - or any other art form - connects with us on so many levels. You might be moved by a piece of music that leaves me cold, and vice versa. A particular painting or sculpture may 'speak' to us in different ways. What I might 'get' from one might be different to what other people do and so on.
I think that if literature, music and art does affect the way we think or respond to things it does so in a more subliminal way than a philosophical, scientific or theological treatise.
Although I'd suggest there's more to theology than dogma and doctrine. Any talk of God is going to take us into the realm of metaphor and 'picture-language.'
Anyhow, I'm interested whether you feel that Tolkein has shaped or informed your attitudes, world-view etc or whether you see his works as stories that are nice to have but which don't necessarily 'change' anything.
Tolkien is basically stories to me. There are other artists who've affected my thinking, but they've either explicitly set out to offer a particular perspective, or it's my response rather than their intention.
Which was rather my point. As I said, I'm open to having my perspective changed or influenced but I want it either the explicit intention of the author or entirely under my own control.
If we're measuring writers by their influence, we have to include Harriet Beecher Stowe in the canon of American literature at least. Uncle Tom's Cabin outsold every other book in the US in the 19th century besides the Bible, attracted people to the abolitionist movement, and helped push the country toward the Civil War.
Tolkien is basically stories to me. There are other artists who've affected my thinking, but they've either explicitly set out to offer a particular perspective, or it's my response rather than their intention.
Which was rather my point. As I said, I'm open to having my perspective changed or influenced but I want it either the explicit intention of the author or entirely under my own control.
I do not know enough about Tolkien's motivations, but for the sake of argument let us say that he wrote his epic works as some kind of response to totalitarianism.
In a sense this has not "worked" on you because you are a person who was never likely to be influenced by nationalism or totalitarianism, but it would be wrong to say that this was not the intent of the author.
Do you see what I mean? Tolkein may not be the best example of this in reality.
I suppose the point I am mostly making is that an author could have had an explicit purpose in mind in writing their fiction even if that purpose was not a direct influence on any individual reader.
A better example might be the author Jacqueline Wilson. Here is someone who is derided as being "woke" because she writes about difficult topics in children's books.
I have not read much myself (although I think I may have read aloud some to a younger person in my family) but according to sources I know who are very familiar with them, the way she writes about these things has had a very direct impact on how they see the world.
Jaqueline Wilson did a book signing in Aberdeen many years ago and my children and I queued for two hours to get our books signed. I don't know about the content of her books, but that experience imprinted on my two (then aged about 8 and 6) that books and their authors are important (a message they already got at home) and that lots of people think so, and are excited about them.
An influential book that comes to my mind is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a depiction of working-class life, focusing on the relationship between working-class people and their employers, in an English town at the beginning of the 20th Century. It's typically cited for its role in motivating/inspiring working-class engagement in British politics.
I read a few of Jacqueline Wilson's books when I worked at the Children's Bookshop (so it was something I needed to know about). She's very good at a child's eye view of something quite traumatic like homelessness, or a parent with mental health issues (The Illustrated Mum).
Jacqueline Wilson has a gift for identifying a situation that a child or young person is finding difficult but can’t discuss with anyone, and using the plot to work through it and come out the other side. She wasn’t yet writing books when I was in my teens (I believe she was editing the “Jackie” magazine!) so I didn’t read any of them until my daughter was little.
I remember reading “Bad Girls” and thinking this was the only book I had ever read which understood both what it was like to be the child of very much older parents and how a group of primary school girls can manage to subtly bully another child without ever being blamed. (My parents were born in the 1920s - my mum had me when she was 43 and my brother when she was nearly 45.) I would love to have had that book available at the age of about 9 or 10 just to start making sense of everything.
I read a big stack of Jacqueline Wilson books between 2001-2003 having discovered "The Lottie Project" on the bookshelf at a girl's boarding school where I was helping out on a Scripture Union holiday. As a male in my late 20s I was very much not the target audience, but I thought they were extraordinary and became mildly obsessed with them. The cheery narration and illustrations contrast strikingly with the often dark subtext which an adult reader quickly perceives - I suspect somebut not all child readers would do the same. "Vicky Angel" and "The Bed and Breakfast Star" were particularly memorable in this regard.
Jacqueline Wilson has a gift for identifying a situation that a child or young person is finding difficult but can’t discuss with anyone, and using the plot to work through it and come out the other side. She wasn’t yet writing books when I was in my teens (I believe she was editing the “Jackie” magazine!) so I didn’t read any of them until my daughter was little.
I remember reading “Bad Girls” and thinking this was the only book I had ever read which understood both what it was like to be the child of very much older parents and how a group of primary school girls can manage to subtly bully another child without ever being blamed. (My parents were born in the 1920s - my mum had me when she was 43 and my brother when she was nearly 45.) I would love to have had that book available at the age of about 9 or 10 just to start making sense of everything.
Jackie magazine is in fact named after Jacqueline Wilson!
It is pretty amazing how influential she still is - as an '89 Millennial without children in my life, she was a huge favourite of mine as a tween and young teen but her newer books are unknown to me - but she still seems to be incredibly popular. And the illustrations by Nick Sharratt are imo absolutely a big part of it.
Jacqueline Wilson has a gift for identifying a situation that a child or young person is finding difficult but can’t discuss with anyone, and using the plot to work through it and come out the other side. She wasn’t yet writing books when I was in my teens (I believe she was editing the “Jackie” magazine!) so I didn’t read any of them until my daughter was little
Jackie magazine is in fact named after Jacqueline Wilson!
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been mentioned but Mary Wollstonecraft would fit into the discussion of influential writers as she was a founding feminist philosopher (she was also a novelist and letter writer). I suspect the reason she is overlooked is because she is a female philosopher and her writing is feminist. I would be interested to know many people on this thread have read her work.
I’ve read at least some of her vindication of the rights of woman…
Personally, if someone wants to change the way I think I want them to do it explicitly in philosophical, scientific or theological works, not through fiction. I don't mind changing my thinking based on fiction, but that feels like my domain rather than the author's.
My experience is that human thinking is a long way from being under our individual intentional control to this degree. My thinking has been influenced significantly by various works of fiction that I have read, even if I didn't read them with that aim in mind. On a fairly basic level, I spend time thinking about what I have read - and some of those thoughts are more consequential than others.
It strikes me that many people who have written for children do so with the intention of addressing topics that they consider to be important or valuable (including the importance of values).
At this point, it's kind of traditional to mention C S Lewis, so I will.
And I recommend his awesome non-fiction and novels as well… 🥰
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been mentioned but Mary Wollstonecraft would fit into the discussion of influential writers as she was a founding feminist philosopher (she was also a novelist and letter writer). I suspect the reason she is overlooked is because she is a female philosopher and her writing is feminist. I would be interested to know many people on this thread have read her work.
I’ve read at least some of her vindication of the rights of woman…
Yes, that's what we touched on, but not in any great depth or detail but it was certainly seen as important.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
This is what Wilson herself has said in interviews - as a tweenage mega fan I read them all. But either way she has still been very influential on young women without them even knowing her as a writer.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
Going back to the thing about literature affecting how we think - or feel - I was struck by this observation from Lady Anne Clifford quoted in Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot In 17th Century England.
The Lady Anne, a wealthy widow, was a great reader and as she grew older employed 'educated females' tp read her the Old Testament and Psalms.
She was also fond of Chaucer and wrote that when engrossed in his works, 'a little part of his bounteous spirit infused itself into me.'
Hmmm ... previous generations put great store on the 'improving' effects of literature. It was seen as making readers more empathetic or capable of 'higher feelings' and so on.
Lady Anne clearly thought that Chaucer's 'bounteous' generosity of spirit rubbed off on her. She could be very generous herself, buying and distributing 'improving' books to people she knew. She once gave the equivalent of a man's annual wage to a bloke who delivered a letter from her daughter.
We've spoken about philosophical and scientific writing. Do we still believe that fiction and poetry can shape our feelings and responses to things?
Can we become more 'bounteous' by reading creative writing whether poetry or prose?
I have both Antonia Fraser’s book and Anne Clifford’s diary on my shelves, perhaps I should revisit them. I certainly think literature (in my case usually history) increases my empathy and understanding of other people and my responses to them. But I am already an empathetic person, a ex-nurse who teaches health and social care, so to a certain extent this reinforces my already present inclinations. Literature can influence emotions and reactions in the same way that music might bring about a response, or a meditation, or a piece of art.
But I am a manic-depressive and, consequently, have strong responses to stimuli so might not be representative.
I've also read the Antonia Fraser and the effect on me has been to reinforce my conviction than every right women gain must be fought for again and again, they are never secure.
I s'pose that the 'humanities' in general - history, philosophy, the arts - should be all about what it means to be human.
The clue is in the title human-ities.
That doesn't mean that the sciences should be cold and clinical.
One of the people in the poetry group I run is a retired dermatologist who runs sessions on medical ethics. She uses poetry to try and develop the empathy of medical students.
It's interesting how she writes. Sometimes the science overwhelms the poetry but at other times it brings an extra dimension that someone without a science background wouldn't be able to bring to the table.
She writes very clinically in a spare and economic style but the 'human' element is always there- even when she is at her bleakest and most atheist.
I'm always impressed by people who step beyond their initial focus and training.
On the empathy thing I often think of Wilfred Owen's dictum that his subject was 'war and the pity of war.'
'The poetry is in the pity.'
And his masterly use of 'pararhyme', dissonance and assonance conveys that.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
But we're not talking about scientific papers or anything related to STEM, so why is that relevant? When studying literature you do have to spend time reading the work in question, that's the entire point.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
But we're not talking about scientific papers or anything related to STEM, so why is that relevant? When studying literature you do have to spend time reading the work in question, that's the entire point.
Well you might think that's the case, but it is not. I cannot explain this to you your satisfaction because I have not actually experienced it myself. However the idea that literature students spend a lot of time studying in detail the text - rather than examining all the secondary texts about the work, the lenses, the commentaries and so on - appears to be wrong.
Incidentally going back to my initial post about Mortimer Adler this was a pre-occupation for him and also a reason why reading the "Great Books" has become a feature of the anti-woke far-right.
In another context I was listening to the Last Night of the Proms the other night. One could say it is harmless nonsense and fun. That is one reading of Land of Hope And Glory.
But it seems that if one actually listens to the words then there's a legitimate point to be made about the slaver-state and jingoism reflected in it.
Again this goes to show how the arts and humanities are more than just about a particular conversation which amounts to white men being bloody amazing.
Sorry to have confused you, @Pomona. Woolstonecraft was on the syllabus and I remember a lecture about her but we didn't go into great depth at an undergraduate level. That's what I meant. There was more on George Eliot.
Students could have gone into more depth on Woolstonecraft had they wanted to explore things further, in a dissertation perhaps.
The same applied to everything else. There was a broad overview but you could go into greater depth if you wished in consultation with your tutor.
Comments
I also came across Li Qingzhao earlier this year. I liked her but the way Chinese poetry is translated into twenty-first century English free verse I don't know that I could tell it from Du Fu except where he or she are clearly speaking as a man or woman. I don't know if that's my unfamiliarity with the conventions of Chinese poetry or the translations or so on?
Born from an egg on a mountaintop…
There was a fair amount of cultural appropriation going on. It was a Japanese production of the Chinese novel Journey to the West (as already mentioned) about a pilgrimage to India and enlightenment, dubbed with a variety of dodgy accents and broadcast in a number of countries around the world.
Above Molière? Sacrilege!
You haven't experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHPXg7fg6Fg
Amen.
Perhaps she's been overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Frankenstein?
It strikes me that many people who have written for children do so with the intention of addressing topics that they consider to be important or valuable (including the importance of values).
At this point, it's kind of traditional to mention C S Lewis, so I will.
A bit.
She came up when I was at university in the early '80s.
I suspect she is on more syllabuses (syllabi?) more now than she was then.
I agree with @Nick Tamen's response to this but I'm going to wonder aloud here ...
I know you are a big Tolkein fan, @KarlLB. Would you say that reading Tolkein has 'shaped' the way you think and respond to things?
Might be a difficult question to answer as literature - or any other art form - connects with us on so many levels. You might be moved by a piece of music that leaves me cold, and vice versa. A particular painting or sculpture may 'speak' to us in different ways. What I might 'get' from one might be different to what other people do and so on.
I think that if literature, music and art does affect the way we think or respond to things it does so in a more subliminal way than a philosophical, scientific or theological treatise.
Although I'd suggest there's more to theology than dogma and doctrine. Any talk of God is going to take us into the realm of metaphor and 'picture-language.'
Anyhow, I'm interested whether you feel that Tolkein has shaped or informed your attitudes, world-view etc or whether you see his works as stories that are nice to have but which don't necessarily 'change' anything.
Just curious.
Which was rather my point. As I said, I'm open to having my perspective changed or influenced but I want it either the explicit intention of the author or entirely under my own control.
It could be argued, though, that an 'explicit intention' by an author might be an example of someone having 'designs' on us.
Although no writing is neutral of course.
I do not know enough about Tolkien's motivations, but for the sake of argument let us say that he wrote his epic works as some kind of response to totalitarianism.
In a sense this has not "worked" on you because you are a person who was never likely to be influenced by nationalism or totalitarianism, but it would be wrong to say that this was not the intent of the author.
Do you see what I mean? Tolkein may not be the best example of this in reality.
I suppose the point I am mostly making is that an author could have had an explicit purpose in mind in writing their fiction even if that purpose was not a direct influence on any individual reader.
I have not read much myself (although I think I may have read aloud some to a younger person in my family) but according to sources I know who are very familiar with them, the way she writes about these things has had a very direct impact on how they see the world.
I remember reading “Bad Girls” and thinking this was the only book I had ever read which understood both what it was like to be the child of very much older parents and how a group of primary school girls can manage to subtly bully another child without ever being blamed. (My parents were born in the 1920s - my mum had me when she was 43 and my brother when she was nearly 45.) I would love to have had that book available at the age of about 9 or 10 just to start making sense of everything.
Jackie magazine is in fact named after Jacqueline Wilson!
It is pretty amazing how influential she still is - as an '89 Millennial without children in my life, she was a huge favourite of mine as a tween and young teen but her newer books are unknown to me - but she still seems to be incredibly popular. And the illustrations by Nick Sharratt are imo absolutely a big part of it.
wot??????? I had no idea! SOF educates me again!
I’ve read at least some of her vindication of the rights of woman…
And I recommend his awesome non-fiction and novels as well… 🥰
Yes, that's what we touched on, but not in any great depth or detail but it was certainly seen as important.
This is what Wilson herself has said in interviews - as a tweenage mega fan I read them all. But either way she has still been very influential on young women without them even knowing her as a writer.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
The Lady Anne, a wealthy widow, was a great reader and as she grew older employed 'educated females' tp read her the Old Testament and Psalms.
She was also fond of Chaucer and wrote that when engrossed in his works, 'a little part of his bounteous spirit infused itself into me.'
Hmmm ... previous generations put great store on the 'improving' effects of literature. It was seen as making readers more empathetic or capable of 'higher feelings' and so on.
Lady Anne clearly thought that Chaucer's 'bounteous' generosity of spirit rubbed off on her. She could be very generous herself, buying and distributing 'improving' books to people she knew. She once gave the equivalent of a man's annual wage to a bloke who delivered a letter from her daughter.
We've spoken about philosophical and scientific writing. Do we still believe that fiction and poetry can shape our feelings and responses to things?
Can we become more 'bounteous' by reading creative writing whether poetry or prose?
But I am a manic-depressive and, consequently, have strong responses to stimuli so might not be representative.
The clue is in the title human-ities.
That doesn't mean that the sciences should be cold and clinical.
One of the people in the poetry group I run is a retired dermatologist who runs sessions on medical ethics. She uses poetry to try and develop the empathy of medical students.
It's interesting how she writes. Sometimes the science overwhelms the poetry but at other times it brings an extra dimension that someone without a science background wouldn't be able to bring to the table.
She writes very clinically in a spare and economic style but the 'human' element is always there- even when she is at her bleakest and most atheist.
I'm always impressed by people who step beyond their initial focus and training.
On the empathy thing I often think of Wilfred Owen's dictum that his subject was 'war and the pity of war.'
'The poetry is in the pity.'
And his masterly use of 'pararhyme', dissonance and assonance conveys that.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
But we're not talking about scientific papers or anything related to STEM, so why is that relevant? When studying literature you do have to spend time reading the work in question, that's the entire point.
Well you might think that's the case, but it is not. I cannot explain this to you your satisfaction because I have not actually experienced it myself. However the idea that literature students spend a lot of time studying in detail the text - rather than examining all the secondary texts about the work, the lenses, the commentaries and so on - appears to be wrong.
Incidentally going back to my initial post about Mortimer Adler this was a pre-occupation for him and also a reason why reading the "Great Books" has become a feature of the anti-woke far-right.
In another context I was listening to the Last Night of the Proms the other night. One could say it is harmless nonsense and fun. That is one reading of Land of Hope And Glory.
But it seems that if one actually listens to the words then there's a legitimate point to be made about the slaver-state and jingoism reflected in it.
Students could have gone into more depth on Woolstonecraft had they wanted to explore things further, in a dissertation perhaps.
The same applied to everything else. There was a broad overview but you could go into greater depth if you wished in consultation with your tutor.