bibliography for Dr. Arbery's October 2010 "Why Literature Matters" ISI lecture

"Why Literature Matters"
Glenn C. Arbery, The Rainier Club, Seattle, Washington, 10/16/2010

Are our writers as lousy as our bankers?
Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash, 3QuarksDaily, 9/27/2010

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst . . .

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

Impact Man
Ruth Franklin, The New Republic, 9/23/2010

Swooning reviews of the new novel have appeared in The New York Times and almost everywhere else, and in its first day on sale the book ranked number one on Amazon. So is Franzen finally smiling? Will he now agree that literature still matters in American culture?

Perhaps not, because in another essay he revealed that he is fundamentally unsure about what purpose literature ought to serve, and thus about what sorts of novels he wants to write . . .

The commotion surrounding the publication of this pseudo-masterpiece reminds me of Orwell’s mordant observation that “to apply a decent standard to the ordinary run of novels is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants. On such a balance as that a flea would simply fail to register; you would have to start by constructing another balance which revealed the fact that there are big fleas and little fleas.” Freedom is a big flea, perhaps even a giant one. But if Franzen is the best we’ve got, he still isn’t good enough. His literary edifices have the look of greatness, but greatness eludes them.

The ‘Freedom’ Agenda
David Brooks, New York Times, 9/20/2010

The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously anxious about status), but there’s something missing.

. . . “Freedom” is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac — overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground.

Smaller Than Life
B.R. Myers, Atlantic, October 2010

But although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son . . . to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen.

Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism at Notre Dame.