The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about
the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and
about the state of literary education inside schools and
universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been
contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is
dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for
thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by
the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized
explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even
greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social
attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may
leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking
merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time
for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value
of literary reading. Seth Lerer presents an original take on
tradition in the literary imagination. He asks how we can have an
unironic, affective relationship to the literary past in an age
marked by historical self-consciousness, critical distance, and
shifts in cultural literacy. Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary
Past ranges through a set of fiction, poetry, and criticism that
makes up our inherited traditions and that also confronts the
question of a literary canon and its personal and historical
meaning. How are we taught to have a felt experience of literary
objects? How do we make our personal anthologies of reading to
shape social selves? Why should we care about what literature does
both to and for us? This book affirms the value of close and
nuanced reading for our understanding of both past and present. Its
larger goal is to explore the ways in which the literary past makes
us, and in the process, how we create canons for reading, teaching,
and scholarship. The writers discussed here were all great readers.
Dickens and Orwell, Rushdie and Bradbury, Dickinson and Frost, Anne
Bradstreet and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Chaucer, Dante, Virgil-they
all built their literary structures on the scaffold of their
bookshelves. Lerer demonstrates how reading the past generates the
literary present, and imagines our literate future.
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