Professor Robert Daly, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative Literature, gave a lecture this past Tuesday on the practical value of literature in everyday life.
The lecture, entitled "Why We have to Read This Stuff and, Worse Yet, Think About It: New Work on the Practical Value of Literature (and even Theory)," was held in the Special Collections Reading Room in 420 Capen Hall and was sponsored by the Humanities Institute.
To Daly, the understanding one can gain from literature is vital to students and non-students alike.
"Through our reading of a literary text, we develop pattern recognition, interpretive and cognitive skills that we can then use to make sense of both literature and life," Daly said. "Once we learn from literature, we can learn from anything."
Daly called literature "case-based learning." Theory, he says, expands on literary ideas.
"Theory is work that migrates out of the field in which it originates, and is used in other fields as a framework for rethinking broad questions," Daly said, quoting a recently published work.
He explained the usefulness of thinking through broad questions in an age of "network culture," one where information always relates to other areas of information.
Daly described how constellations are just clusters of stars and technically do not exist, but are useful in navigation. In a similar way, he says, people can study literature to gain direction in their lives.
"Like the constellations," he said, "literature and theory help us to navigate, to set our sails, to make sense and to make our way in the world."
He also explained the particular value of studying literature in gaining experience for life, and gaining that experience before it is needed.
"We know that people are strengthened and ennobled by suffering, but we don't want to suffer," Daly said.
He said that new discoveries in the working of the brain show that when we read or witness something, it has much the same effect on our brain as when we experience the same situation ourselves. Therefore, when we vicariously experience situations characters experience in literature, we can prepare ourselves for similar situations in our own lives by learning from their suffering.
Daly recently published the book "God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry" as well as several other essays on early and 19th century American literature. He has been a Leverhulme Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a five-time National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar Director.
In the teaching arena, he has won the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Student Association's Milton Plesur Memorial Teaching Award and the Pan-Hellenic Council's Chi Omega Excellence in Teaching award, a Career Services Award.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
