Pretty uncontroversial, I would think. But there’s an inevitable anticlimax when one tries to summarize in a brief formula the value of literature as such. Any such effort will fall short, and leave out whole realms of function — think for example how far your formula falls from Jakobson’s famously cryptic but profound account of poetry in terms of the “axes” of “selection” and “combination”. And more seriously, no such formula could really supply the motive for a non-reader to become a reader, any more than a travel writer could stir your lust for travel by telling his retrospective life lessons rather than his adventures.

Yeah, it was never my mission to exhaust the definition of what gives literature value; that’s just not ever going to happen. But I think it’s a worthwhile enterprise to try articulating some of what gives it value if only as a response to the growing fad of Reality Hunger-style dismissals of literature.

Huh, hadn’t heard of that (I’m pretty out of touch with contemporary American stuff). But the excerpts online are very far from dismissing literature. Dismissing middle-of-the-road literary fiction, sure, and I think rightly so (though of course tastes differ in detail), but he’s celebrating a banquet of specific alternatives.

There’s so much exciting older and foreign stuff to read (see for a random example Elif Batuman’s Russian suggestions) that it’s hard to care about the deficits he identifies, rightly or wrongly, in the current scene. Unless you’re trying to break into it, which is, as it were, another story.

This didn’t sound much like a dismissal of only middle-of-the-road fiction to me:

I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage works are nearly always “about what they’re about”—which may sound a tad tautological—but when I read a book that I really love, I’m excited because I can feel the writer’s excitement that in every paragraph he’s manifestly exploring his subject.

That’s the part that my article was partially a reaction to. Narrative and characters matter as more than just vehicles to unload a philosophical treatise.

By the way, thanks for linking to that Batuman article. My reading list is already badly bloated, but it looks like I’m going to have to add some of her rec’s.