LITERARY CULTURE: Nationalism and the Study of Literature

Why do we study literature in school? Why do we not accept it, like architecture and music, as a natural expression of the culture, one that does not have to be analyzed and taught as part of a general education? I submit that there are only two reasons why literature has been studied as an academic subject. First, at certain stages in a nation's history a foreign literature may be studied out of reverence for the civilization it embodies, which is accepted as superior to the civilization of those studying. Second, when nationalism or some narrower form of ethnocentricity rears its head, the native literature is resurrected, refurbished, and reinterpreted as a means of defining the national character. I wonder whether we may not just now be passing from the first to the second stage in our study of literature in American education. We could begin with Sanskrit, or Avestan, or Arabic, but the great example for us of the study of a foreign literature for the civilization it embodies is the study of Latin throughout Europe from the sixth century to the sixteenth. For some ten centuries after the Roman Empire had ceased to exist, its language and literature were the archetypes of what language and literature ought to be. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid were prototypes of poetry; Cicero, Caesar, and Seneca were prototypes of prose. Greek and Hebraic literatures were early amalgamated with the Roman, so that Aeneas, Ulysses, and Abraham could function almost interchangeably as symbols of man voyaging through life, and Dido, Penelope, and Ruth as the hostages he