MONKEY WRENCH WE NEED TO GO DEEPER PROFESSIONAL
Dillon and Craig suggest that stories perform a variety of social functions (among them the framing of issues in particularly illuminating ways, providing varieties of points of views, anticipating potential futures, creating and consolidating identities, and mimicking the present so as to illuminate it in helpful new ways), and argue that literary studies professionals are experts not just in understanding how they do so-that they do so-and what we should read them as doing, but also (by dint of our professional role as readers) in the scope of texts that can illuminate particular issues best. As Dillon and Craig point out, this is in distinction from more familiar ideas of where the humanities operate in public (in newspaper articles, say, or in the roles of “public intellectuals”) I’ll also note, though that’s not very important, that it’s not where I’ve seen the public role of the humanities so far. “Narrative evidence,” Dillon and Craig say, is “the product of the expert act of both direct critical engagement with stories, and critical engagement with others’ reading, viewing, or listening to stories” (3) “public reasoning” is the “practical activity of when making decisions in the public interest” (9): think expert advisory bodies, parliamentary hearings: the apparatus of (democratic, anyway) government. So what is Storylistening about? Dillon and Craig hold that stories provide what they call “narrative evidence” that is important to make better “public reasoning” (1). But I’ve seen no-one make as convincing a case for literary studies as Dillon and Craig. It may be the most important book I’ve read in a decade, if only for the anticipatory future in which its most important belief, that studying stories has important public function, has secured a place for thinking with stories about public problems. It’s an unlovely book-I’ll get to that below-and it’s a difficult book, but it’s an immensely necessary book.
If you’re in literary studies, you must go and read this book if you’re in government (but why would you be, if you’re reading this blog), you must go and read this book. I’m talking about Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig’s 2022 Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning. And now, I’m expanding my reach to write books I respect, books I think are vitally important, books that leave me excited. That is why Hooked, and that is why Generous Thinking. I tend to write here about two kinds of books: books I hate and books I love.
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