The Value(s) of a Literary Education: Beauty, Truth, Language, Freedom, and Democracy

Of all the humanistic disciplines, literary study is the least rule- and goal-oriented. This has led to repeated efforts to prove its worth, either by systematizing the tenets that inform its study or by tying it to some notion of value that can be measured in the market. But, paradoxically, literary study is never more powerful than when it is enjoyed and cherished on its own terms, as a realm where the deepest questions of life are contemplated in rich and subtle language, and the reader is initiated gradually in the relationship between reading, thinking, selfhood, freedom, beauty, and power. In this lecture, the novelist Chandrahas Choudhury will attempt to demonstrate how a literary education can, especially when we are young, give us new eyes with which to understand ourselves and new ambitions and discontents for our public and private lives.