For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and
condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very
good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of
literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries:
philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders
of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas
Sarkozy, literature's haters have questioned the value of
literature-its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness-and have
attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness. Literature does not start
with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving
the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of
Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the
first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is
no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided
with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and
scandal has defined it ever since. In the long rhetorical war
against literature, Marx identifies four indictments-in the name of
authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him
to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing
the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures
of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given
society came to expect from literature. In this way,
anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it
wishes to deny. The only threat to literature's continued
existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
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