Why read?

by Mark Edmundson

"In this book, author Mark Edmundson dramatizes what the recent identity crisis in the humanities has effectively obscured: that reading can change your life for the better. Edmundson's controversial Harper's Magazine article "On the Uses of the Liberal Arts: As Light Entertainment for Bored College Students" has been the most photocopied essay on college campuses over the past five years. Here he picks up where that piece left off." "Edmundson enjoins educators to stop offering condescending analystic technique and facile entertainment and to begin teaching students to read in a way that can change their lives for the better. He argues that questions about the uses of literature - what would it mean to live out of this book, to see it as a guide to life - are the central questions to ask in a literary education. Right now these questions are being ignored, even suppressed. And if religion continues to lose its hold on significant sections of society, what can take its place in shaping