Karen Swallow Prior is an author and professor of English at Liberty University. She’s written several books, including her latest, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, in which she argues that understanding the moral framework of a novel is the key to reading it well.
While sitting in her favorite reading spot, Prior spoke with the Washington Examiner about the role of virtue in literature and how reading fiction can be an unexpected antidote for our fractured national discourse. The following interview has been edited for clarity.
You just wrapped up another semester teaching at Liberty. What kinds of literary wisdom do you try to impart to your students?
This semester, I taught the English novel, which is my favorite class to teach. The last novel we read is Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and it’s just fun to see the narrator of that novel poking fun at and expressing disdain for evangelicalism. I tell my students, “Criticism of evangelicalism didn’t begin in 2016. It’s been around for a long, long time.”
This is one of the great gifts of reading literature: It helps us to see so far beyond our current moment. Because so many people who are disillusioned by evangelicalism don’t even know what it is historically, and they only associate it with the past two years.
Another thing: I think it’s been two years since I’ve taught this course, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles revolves around … basically a date rape situation. And Thomas Hardy was questioning the sexual double standard of the Victorian era that said that a woman who was not a virgin wasn’t pure, regardless of how it happened.
My students were really passionate and incensed, and they understood the novel in a way that I had not seen before. And I think that’s because there’s been so much discussion because of #MeToo and #ChurchToo. It was a very powerful part of the semester because they could understand what Hardy saw back in the 1890s that we’re still wrestling with today.
In On Reading Well, you reference Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry when you write, “Since history is restricted to what was and philosophy to what could be, Sidney argues, literature exceeds both by offering a picture of what should be.” Why is that picture important?
It’s important because we all want what should be, in our own lives and in the world around us. And literature not only puts those pictures in front of us but also cultivates more of the desire for what should be. Literature by its very nature prompts us to pursue the “shoulds.”
Throughout your book, you explore great works of literature by examining them through the cardinal, theological, and heavenly virtues, which you admit is an uncommon way to look at literature in the 21st century. Why do readers need this form of literary criticism?
There isn’t enough discussion about how literature forms us as readers. That’s why I think so many people who voraciously read nonfiction or news or journalism don’t appreciate reading fiction because they think that information is so important and overlook the way that what we read and how we read forms us, not only in our character but in our way of thinking as well.
You write that “great books offer perspectives more than lessons.” What other things distinguish literature from, say, a good essay?
A literary mind, a mind that has been formed by literature and is attuned to the way literary language works, is one that is more circumspect, that is able to see and consider other points of view more easily. I think that this is actually what is so lacking in our culture today, this kind of literary mind. That is what has brought us to the sort of fake news and post-truth era. We just don’t know anymore how to see that words have different meanings and different contexts.
This sort of flat, literal understanding of the news, of politics, of our opponents, of the words that our opponents use, I think that’s a big part of why our debates are going nowhere and polarization just continues to increase because people just don’t have the kind of layered understanding that literature cultivates in readers.
If literature is communal, as you said earlier, are there ways that reading well can improve our relationships?
A couple of years ago, right after the election, I had a piece in the Atlantic about Walt Whitman and how he called America the world’s “greatest poem.” And he was writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the nation was really polarized and fractured, but he saw hope and potential for the United States to be united again — because, not in spite of, the differences — because these differences actually do make America like a poem, which is filled with disparate images and parts that are held together.
I think that part of our polarization results from the inability of so many people to see that understanding is not the same as agreeing. They can’t make that distinction. But that’s what literature does for us. It gives us the perspective of characters and narrators and people that we may or may not agree with, but that’s what helps us to the distinction between agreeing and understanding.
This is a really controversial work, but I think of Nabokov’s Lolita. It is one of the most brilliant works of literature ever written because it puts us in the mind of a pedophile, and it is a novel that in the end is redemptive. But it’s really kind of a treacherous journey that we take to get there. I think it’s one of the most powerful examples of that power that literature has to help us see someone’s perspective at the very same time we are vehemently disagreeing with it.
What’s your most controversial literary opinion?
People tend to fall into two different camps on this, and the ones who fall into the opposing camp really do push back. And that is the one about marking in a book. I’ve gotten a lot of responses on Twitter, even lately, from people whom I’ve converted and are happy that they have transformed from nonmarkers to markers, and they’re finding that their reading experience is so much deeper and richer.
