The Idea Orphanage
By Michael Ennis
Posted on
Here are some thoughts from the Sam’s Club café, where I am enjoying a three-meat pizza and soda combo. I bought them with some loose change. They have, you’ll have to trust me on this, prompted the following line of thinking.
I teach literature, or what’s left of it, and I often make two diametrically opposed rationales for continuing to read literature when no one really seems to care. On the one hand, literature is the last bulwark against consumer capitalism. To read literature from any era keeps our minds alive, resisting the ready-made and reproducible. It brings with it a pleasure wholly outside the immediate gratifications of shiny objects. In other words, literature maintains a contemporary political exigency. It helps us resist the omnipresence of consumerism.…
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