I first came across Edmundson anthologized in the 2012 edition of The Best American Essays. His “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?” is a sincere if didactic piece addressed to the first-year university student.

The essay provides a glimpse behind the curtain of higher ed as an institution with institutional prerogatives (conservatism, economics, consumerism, careerism, etc.) Edmundson hopes to help young scholars navigate their university experience. He encourages sincerity in a context of cynicism, in asking students to engage honestly and seriously with the great works they will read.

Whereas “Who Are You?” is addressed to young scholars, Why Read? is addressed firstly to professors and teachers of literature. The message is the same —

Sincerity and openness to great ideas can save us. If a work is great, Edmundson insists, it constitutes a way of being or living.

He writes:

Poetry — literature in general — is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes. Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. (pp. 2–3)

Why Read? comes alive when Edmundson explicates his own reading of great aesthetic work. Through his experiences as a reader, he attempts to articulate the transcendent possibilities of reading:

Proust and Emerson touch on two related activities that are central to a true education in the humanities. The first is the activity of discovering oneself as one is in great writing. The second, and perhaps more important, is to see glimpses of a self — and too, perhaps, of a world — that might be, a self and world that you can begin working to create. “Reading,” Proust says in a circumspect mood, “is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” Proust and Emerson point toward a span of questions that matter especially for the young, though they count for us all, too. They are questions that should lie at the core of a liberal arts education. Who am I? What might I become? What is this world in which I find myself? How might it be changed for the better? (p. 5)

Indeed, a compelling vision for a liberal arts education.

But this is very much out-of-vogue in the university climate (despite the best efforts of scholars such as Harold Bloom.)

In Why Read?, Edmundson’s take on the infusion of theory in literary studies is convincing. When we can simply label, he asks, why read? Borrowing words from disciplines we know not of and packing great work into neatly labeled ziplock bags — Marxist. Feminist. Oedipal. Postcolonial. Hegemonic. Categorical imperative. What sort of knowledge are we creating exactly? Edmundson likens such shortcuts to that sort of religious knowledge that can at once be attained and conveniently packed away. No need to probe or reflect.

No need for a real transaction, to evoke the living legacy of Louise Rosenblatt.

If you set theory between readers and literature — if you make theory a prerequisite to discussing a piece of writing — you effectively deny the student a chance to encounter the first level of literary density, the level he’s ready to negotiate. Theory is used, then, to banish aspiring readers from literary experience that by rights belongs to them. (p. 41)

If Derrida / Foucault / Frye / Freud / ______ are worth studying, well let’s take a serious look at their work. But when we simply borrow their terms to encase aesthetic work — which, when it actually has something to say about our lives, is much more worth our attention — we are cheating ourselves.

The religious fervor that sometimes creeps into Edmundson’s tone strikes me at times as awkward, jangly. Other times, as a reader, I find this enthusiasm… alluring. Is it useful? I have only recently read Karen Armstrong, whom Edmundson quotes in the book, and I have since found myself looking for ways to live out the mythos which, Armstrong asserts, has been written out of contemporary life.

And yet, while Edmundson attempts to articulate many different humanisms, I find it hard to see myself, as a humanist, anywhere.

Which seems strange.

As a phenomenon, is this isolation historical? Terry Eagleton, in his latest work, Culture and the Death of God, recounts the historical inability of ideology and culture to fulfill that deep human need that some have called “God.”

Are Edmundson’s clumsy metaphysics completely necessary? I’m really not sure.

In the end, at least, I was pushed to a greater Kindle-literacy: I rarely feel compelled to grapple so seriously with the impossible keyboard of my Paperwhite as I did while reading this book.