The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

To consider the phenomenon in a relatively innocuous form: I have been involved in one way or another in higher education for most of my adult life. I have seen any number of scholarly fads come and go. A new approach can refresh a field of study, and when this happens it is an excellent thing. A new approach can have the relationship to its field of study that a very small lifeboat has to a large and sinking ship. Ill-advised crowding, unwholesome proximity, uncivil exclusion. And who knows for sure that the ship was really sinking after all. As a professor of literature, more or less, I have seen scholarly criticism given over to quasi-sociology, or -psychology, or -economic theory, or -anthropology, taking some sort of authority from the imposition of jargon that is either dubious in itself, wholly inappropriate to its subject, or both. This looks to me like the abandonment of literature as such, its reduction to data to be fed into theories. It is only logical in the circumstances that the individual student’s encounter with a book should be marginalized in favor of a more knowing construction of its meaning. Nothing is lost except everything that makes literature the preeminent art. The music of it would clog the conceptual machinery. I have had students at the Workshop tell me that until they came there they had never heard the word “beautiful” applied to a literary text. Beside the great interest this phenomenon has always had in itself, beauty is a strategy of emph...