What do you think?
Rate this book
Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History
For 2500 years people have been debating how literature changes lives, and versions of those debates continue today in classrooms, school and library boardrooms, and state legislatures. The life-transforming potential of books caught the attention of Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Percy Shelley, and many others. Better Living through Literature surveys what the great thinkers have said on the subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to W.E.B Du Bois, Harold Bloom, and Martha Nussbaum. Contending that reading is sometimes like playing with dynamite, Robin Bates brings the issues alive with compelling accounts of stories and poems upending individual lives and sometimes history itself.
414 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 20, 2024
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 20, 2024
Recent years have seen a concerted attack on the humanities, a war on literature by and about people of color and other marginalized groups. Censors and book banners have been waging a war on stories and storytellers, but they have not gone unopposed, which is why Professor Robin Bates’ book “Better Living through Literature” (Quoir 2024) is both necessary and welcome. Professor Bates has spent his life advocating for stories, novels, plays, and poems, arguing that imaginative literature empowers us to face challenges of our modern world, and arguing that literature offers insights that can and do inform our understanding of the issues we face. He explains the book’s central purpose as an examination into “how and why literature changes people’s lives” (7)
I’ve been following Professor Bates’ popular blog “Better Living through Beowulf” for many years, and as a high school teacher searching for ways to make both canonical and contemporary texts relevant to my students, the blog was an invaluable resource, a mentor for reading literature through a historical lens as well as a reader response framework. Now Professor Bates has brought these frameworks to his latest book.
The opening quote from Leslie Martin Silko’s “Ceremony” signals to readers what they can expect from “Better Living through Literature”:
“I will tell you something about stories, [he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.”
For those trained to see literature as separate from the sciences, trained to view literature as aesthetic artifacts we dissect to find literary devices, Bates offers an alternate way to share literature, offering ways Fitzgerald, Ginsberg, Achibe, Yeats, and others have been leveraged to respond to modern times.
Readers will also find a fresh take on how to see censors and book banners as folks who acknowledge the power of literature; a powerful personal essay on how Bates arrived at his love of literature, which teachers can use as a mentor text; examples of his own students’ insights into the merits of storytelling; and pedagogical insights for teaching complex texts and those that raise concerns about appropriate language from some parents and administrators. Indeed, Bates challenges ELA teachers to be “life coaches” (24).
An important, salient feature of the book is its readability. Another is its structure. Although Bates weaves the language of the professor throughout the book, it’s a text accessible to teachers at all levels, and to most parents, as well as to many high school students. Bates knows his audience and offers them a book they can understand and use.
The book’s structure invites readers to select sections most relevant to them. For example, college instructors might be drawn to Part II and the analysis of Plato and Aristotle while high school teachers will find the chapters on individual novels and poets most helpful.
As a poet and teacher who loves sharing poetry with students, I found myself drawn to the section on Horace and his advice to poets not to be long-winded but to view poetry as a tool for teaching (69).
Meanwhile, the chapter on Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud addresses ways parents and elementary teachers can respond to the immersion into fairy tales in discussions with their children: “But their parents and teachers can use their knowledge about how the stories are working to identify anxieties and talk with their children about them” (145).
Late in the book Bates returns to the personal in an examination of the Anglo Saxon hero Beowulf. “Beowulf,” explains Bates, is a text that assisted him as he grieved after the death of his son who drowned at age 21 in what Bates characterizes as “a freak drowning accident” (306). In that moment he turned to beloved poet Mary Oliver who wrote these words: “Pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw” (307).
Those of us who love literature, who devote our lives to sharing stories and poems with young people understand “Literature…steps forth when we need it most” (305).
I wish I’d had a book like “Better Living through Literature” as a young teacher rather than having most of my undergrad coursework privilege New Criticism. With its structure like a road map through literary history into the present, and with its focus on literature as a useful and necessary part of our survival and flourishing in the modern world while offering helpful analysis of major theories, I’ll be recommending the book to both secondary teachers and professors, as well as to elementary teachers and parents.
*I am providing this review at the request of the author. The review reflects my honest assessment of the book.?
I’ve been following Professor Bates’ popular blog “Better Living through Beowulf” for many years, and as a high school teacher searching for ways to make both canonical and contemporary texts relevant to my students, the blog was an invaluable resource, a mentor for reading literature through a historical lens as well as a reader response framework. Now Professor Bates has brought these frameworks to his latest book.
The opening quote from Leslie Martin Silko’s “Ceremony” signals to readers what they can expect from “Better Living through Literature”:
“I will tell you something about stories, [he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.”
For those trained to see literature as separate from the sciences, trained to view literature as aesthetic artifacts we dissect to find literary devices, Bates offers an alternate way to share literature, offering ways Fitzgerald, Ginsberg, Achibe, Yeats, and others have been leveraged to respond to modern times.
Readers will also find a fresh take on how to see censors and book banners as folks who acknowledge the power of literature; a powerful personal essay on how Bates arrived at his love of literature, which teachers can use as a mentor text; examples of his own students’ insights into the merits of storytelling; and pedagogical insights for teaching complex texts and those that raise concerns about appropriate language from some parents and administrators. Indeed, Bates challenges ELA teachers to be “life coaches” (24).
An important, salient feature of the book is its readability. Another is its structure. Although Bates weaves the language of the professor throughout the book, it’s a text accessible to teachers at all levels, and to most parents, as well as to many high school students. Bates knows his audience and offers them a book they can understand and use.
The book’s structure invites readers to select sections most relevant to them. For example, college instructors might be drawn to Part II and the analysis of Plato and Aristotle while high school teachers will find the chapters on individual novels and poets most helpful.
As a poet and teacher who loves sharing poetry with students, I found myself drawn to the section on Horace and his advice to poets not to be long-winded but to view poetry as a tool for teaching (69).
Meanwhile, the chapter on Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud addresses ways parents and elementary teachers can respond to the immersion into fairy tales in discussions with their children: “But their parents and teachers can use their knowledge about how the stories are working to identify anxieties and talk with their children about them” (145).
Late in the book Bates returns to the personal in an examination of the Anglo Saxon hero Beowulf. “Beowulf,” explains Bates, is a text that assisted him as he grieved after the death of his son who drowned at age 21 in what Bates characterizes as “a freak drowning accident” (306). In that moment he turned to beloved poet Mary Oliver who wrote these words: “Pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw” (307).
Those of us who love literature, who devote our lives to sharing stories and poems with young people understand “Literature…steps forth when we need it most” (305).
I wish I’d had a book like “Better Living through Literature” as a young teacher rather than having most of my undergrad coursework privilege New Criticism. With its structure like a road map through literary history into the present, and with its focus on literature as a useful and necessary part of our survival and flourishing in the modern world while offering helpful analysis of major theories, I’ll be recommending the book to both secondary teachers and professors, as well as to elementary teachers and parents.
*I am providing this review at the request of the author. The review reflects my honest assessment of the book.?
August 23, 2024
Those of us who love literature have often been challenged to prove its value -- a difficult task, given the nature of quality and the unquantifiability of literature's merits. Robin Bates* has made it his professional quest to make the case for literature. He does it effectively here.
This very readable book mixes literary analysis, compilation and analysis of criticism, and personal narrative (that of Bates and of others) to pile up evidence that literature is more than mere entertainment. My favorite highlights herein include many examples of how his university students merged literature and life in projects for his classes.
Harvard prof Marjorie Garber has decried overspecialization among scholars, indicating instead her belief that scholars should be widely experienced. In the world of literature, that means being widely read...and deeply read. Bates exemplifies this, and uses it to excellent effect in the book. His six-days-a-week blog, Better Living Through Beowulf (highly recommended!), has addressed several hundred different texts over its 15+ years of operation. I am a frequent reader* of that blog, which I have often found very valuable to my career as a teacher of high school English. But that's not all: his forays into sport, history, politics, music, film, and much more have enlightened me as a person and citizen, while also inspiring me to think interdisciplinarily, synthesize across genres, and read widely.
References to dozens of books, poems, and plays invigorate BLTL as they do the blog BLTB; I'm especially pleased to see the critics that Bates has assimilated here. It's accessible, too: one need not be an expert in Wayne Booth or Harold Bloom or Aristotle or Martha Nussbaum or W.E.B. DuBois or Gilbert & Gubar or any of the many other scholars to get a clear sense of how they advise us to interact with the texts that surround us. And the inquiry doesn't stop at the traditional canon, although he's certainly pro-canon: the book weighs in thoughtfully on some well-known so-called "beach reads"/"pop lit." That said, the breadth of canonical authors considered here is massive. Austen, Baldwin, Cervantes, Dickens, Euripides, and Flaubert start an abecedary of the greats who are part of the impressively comprehensive examination.
Read the whole thing, or find your favorite book in the index and check out how Bates investigates its reflection of the human condition and probably even its effects on the real world. There is a lot to absorb here, and the effort is a joyful one.
* Disclosure: I have known Robin Bates for years and have contributed a few columns to his blog. He is a mentsch, but that's not why the book deserves this review. I share his objective and am impressed by his decades of work -- as professor, blogger, and author of this book -- to lay out the essential case for the value of literature.
This very readable book mixes literary analysis, compilation and analysis of criticism, and personal narrative (that of Bates and of others) to pile up evidence that literature is more than mere entertainment. My favorite highlights herein include many examples of how his university students merged literature and life in projects for his classes.
Harvard prof Marjorie Garber has decried overspecialization among scholars, indicating instead her belief that scholars should be widely experienced. In the world of literature, that means being widely read...and deeply read. Bates exemplifies this, and uses it to excellent effect in the book. His six-days-a-week blog, Better Living Through Beowulf (highly recommended!), has addressed several hundred different texts over its 15+ years of operation. I am a frequent reader* of that blog, which I have often found very valuable to my career as a teacher of high school English. But that's not all: his forays into sport, history, politics, music, film, and much more have enlightened me as a person and citizen, while also inspiring me to think interdisciplinarily, synthesize across genres, and read widely.
References to dozens of books, poems, and plays invigorate BLTL as they do the blog BLTB; I'm especially pleased to see the critics that Bates has assimilated here. It's accessible, too: one need not be an expert in Wayne Booth or Harold Bloom or Aristotle or Martha Nussbaum or W.E.B. DuBois or Gilbert & Gubar or any of the many other scholars to get a clear sense of how they advise us to interact with the texts that surround us. And the inquiry doesn't stop at the traditional canon, although he's certainly pro-canon: the book weighs in thoughtfully on some well-known so-called "beach reads"/"pop lit." That said, the breadth of canonical authors considered here is massive. Austen, Baldwin, Cervantes, Dickens, Euripides, and Flaubert start an abecedary of the greats who are part of the impressively comprehensive examination.
Read the whole thing, or find your favorite book in the index and check out how Bates investigates its reflection of the human condition and probably even its effects on the real world. There is a lot to absorb here, and the effort is a joyful one.
* Disclosure: I have known Robin Bates for years and have contributed a few columns to his blog. He is a mentsch, but that's not why the book deserves this review. I share his objective and am impressed by his decades of work -- as professor, blogger, and author of this book -- to lay out the essential case for the value of literature.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews