The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing

by Arnold Weinstein

A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives

Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person―and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge―and come to understand its cost.

In The Lives of Literature , a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Books About Books, Education, Literary Criticism

352 pages, Hardcover

Published January 18, 2022

About the author

Dr. Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching for over 35 years. He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Among his many academic honors, research grants, and fellowships is the Younger Humanist Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award as a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Brown University's award as best teacher in the humanities, Professeur InvitÈ in American Literature at the Ecole Normale SupÈrieure in Paris, and a Fellowship for University Professors from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Weinstein is the author of many books, including Fictions of the Self: 1550ñ1800 (1981); Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (1993); and A Scream Goes Through The House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (2003). Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton University Press, 2008), was named one of the 25 Best Books of 2009 by The Atlantic. Professor Weinstein chaired the Advisory Council on Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is the sponsor of Swedish Studies at Brown, and is actively involved in the American Comparative Literature Association.

Reviews

[Karl Kronlage · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a high school English teacher of 27 years, I sigh as new teachers keep getting the greenlight to led a PD where they teach us luddites a thing or two about technology as if we don't know anything. It's not as it I don't like learning a thing or two about technology. From NearPod to Remind (which we had a PD on one year and were told not to use it the next), I like discovering new things. But it doesn't excite me. I find it boring to learn the newest, slightly different variation of a PowerPoint. What I really love is learning about literature. Sorry to say this, but a neophyte isn't going to be able to delivery on this front.

I enjoy reading classics, for which of us does not have a hole in our knowledge? I try to alternate between reading a book from the 19th century or before, to a book of the 20th century, and then one of the 21st century. I don't stick to this rotation, but this is my ideal. I may read the introduction or some blurb on Wikipedia and try to figure out a question like "Why is To the Lighthouse" so famous? So who do I seek out as a mentor? Arnold Weinstein, a teachers at Brown University, an Ivy League school, who has been teaching for five decades is a good place to start.

Reading The Live of Literature, I felt like I was listening to a friend ramble on. I found myself nodding my head as he expounded on the "zoom days" of the pandemic. It's hard to believe how much I forgot (probably intentionally). And he has such an optimistic outlook, even when he warns that he won't. And while the memoir portion was interesting enough, it was not my favorite part of the book.

I really enjoyed his section on the cost of knowledge. With books I've read, it put them into a new light. I enjoyed hearing his take on Huck Finn, the Metamorphosis, Oedipus Rex, the Beloved, and even though it wasn't featured, the Sound and the Furry. Likewise, he got me interested in reading King Lear, Wuthering Heights, Naked Lunch, Ulysses, and Benito Cereno. I don't know which was better: reading about the books I have or haven't read.

Speaking of "the cost of knowledge," I can't help but think about the books I teach. In Brave New World, there is a price that John the Savage pays when he discovers that the modern society isn't what he thought it was. In the Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard pays a price once he has knowledge of what happened to his wife after he sold her off when he was drunk (and continues to pay it until the book ends). I even see it in the book I'm currently reading, All the Kings Men.
Two others that I teacher: Macbeth and Caesar have a price as well when characters have that knowledge, so I feel that it will bring another dimension to my teaching. Thanks Mr. Weinstein for that.

And as far as the gaffes that he has made, I hardly found any of them too horrible and it's good to see him put it all out there. In the end, his depth of reading is impressive. He's read many author's I've never heard of (and many I have) from all over.

All and all, I am the target audience for this book. Knowing what the book is about, you have to ask yourself if you are too.

[Allie · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you enjoy literature, I recommend reading pretty much any piece of literature rather than spend your time reading this rambling mess of a book.

[ASC Library]

801 Wei

[Noret Flood · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.1

Several parts of this book really altered my way of thinking about reading. Bravo.