Notes Towards an Applied Literature

Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it is, not for what we want it to be, believe it ought to be, and not through the lens of our own dispositions and beliefs.

Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret modern politics with Shakespeare, but we will find again and again that he had named so much of what we see today, and that those names are useful companions in the struggle of thought.

This idea is familiar to psychology, too. To remove a fear, you first have to name it. To purge a repressed emotion, you must give it the right label. One friend tells me all the young women she knows spend hours discussing Sally Rooney novels and in this way are examining their romantic lives more closely than they ever would otherwise. Another re... See more

Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.