The return has begun, are you on your way?

[niveau]

Around the interwebs, some the literati, in particular Scott Eric Kaufman, are getting concerned: Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the next-two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterday-but more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind. Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them. His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic: literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us. Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic. He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described...

...My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses, but to point to how thin this justification of our work is. One course in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist. On one level, we know this-witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe-but on another, our professional identity intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read...
And back to reading Plato we go. Humanise, humanise, humanise!!!
~Niveau