Why Read Literature?

The Decline of the English Department

"In this country and in England, the study of English literature began in the latter part of the 19th century as an exercise in the scientific pursuit of philological research, and those who taught it subscribed to the notion that literature was best understood as a product of language. The discipline treated the poems and narratives of a particular place, the British Isles, as evidence of how the linguistic roots of that place — Germanic, Romance, and other — conditioned what had been set before us as “masterpieces.” The twin focus, then, was on the philological nature of the enterprise and the canon of great works to be studied in their historical evolution."

The the ancillary role of literature to science goes beyond the folk tales collected by those philologists, the Brothers Grimm. For example, pick up an old burgundy copy of the Book of Knowledge (before the Internet, we had these collections of facts called encyclopedias):

Volume 4 (1957).
"Time and the Seasons"

1. The Round of the Year by Coventry Patmore
2. Days by Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Time, You Old Gipsy Man by Ralph Hodgson
4. The Garden Year by Sara Coleridge
5. Written in March by William Wordsworth
6. Song from Pippa Passes by Robert Browning
7. Why It Was Cold in May by Henrietta Robins Eliot
8. June (from the Vision of Sir Launfal) by James Russell Lowell
9. Summer is Icumen In
10. When the Frost is on the Punkin' by James Whitcomb Riley
11. November in England by Thomas Hood
12. The First Snow-Fall by James Russell Lowell
13. The Frost by Hannah Flagg Gould