How the Universities Drove the Transcendent Out of Literature, and How to Get It Back https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/arts-culture/2020/05/how-the-universities-drove-the-transcendent-out-of-literature-and-how-to-get-it-back/

May 18, 2020 | William Kolbrener
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Criticizing contemporary humanities professors for having “snuffed out the divine” in their disciplines, William Kolbrener argues that in so doing they have denied literature’s ability to let the reader transcend his own experiences, instead falling back on the narrowmindedness of identity politics.

In a time when the most educated have dispensed with traditional knowledge as a form of wisdom, the humanities have [rejected the] notion that works of the past can help edify our sense of who we are today, and more than that, help us move forward into an uncertain future. [But] we do not have to give up our identities—or commitments—when encountering minds, cultures, and worlds different from our own.

[For today’s politically correct critic], it’s understood that it if you’re a gay man, or a black woman, or even a Jew, it’s difficult to approach a work—let’s say John Milton’s Paradise Lost—that presupposes a white male Protestant reader. With that said, I am a Jew, and a Miltonist. . . . I can look with awe at his representations of God, faith, and the human psyche. I may exercise my skepticism when reading and interpreting him—and Milton is above all a skeptical believer—but it does not stop me . . . from being inspired, not only by Milton’s God, but by Milton’s Adam and Eve, his man and woman.

Finding the infinite in literature—in Homer, Shakespeare, or even the self-proclaimed atheist Virginia Woolf—[can lead to] a better understanding, in our world of suffering, of the possibilities for freedom and human transcendence.

Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/reading-in-the-time-of-corona/