"While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes..."

Blazing Reader,

Professor Michael Rainsborough holds a Ph.D. in War Studies and has taught strategic theory for 25 years at the University of London. Here's what he has to say about the power of novels:

While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes, novels and poems are out there doing the real work: showing us what it actually feels like to be alive.

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), [Richard Rorty] suggested that a good novel will expand one’s moral imagination far more than any philosophical tract. Literature is a better moral compass because it throws us into the vivid chaos of individual lives, instead of forcing human experience into some procrustean theoretical framework.

Sometimes a single sentence from Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Camus tells us more about integrity, honour, cruelty and hope than a thousand pages of scholarly ‘analysis’ ever could....

Great literature, not academic gibbering, gets closest to the essence of human affairs. The Greeks, the Bible, the great tragedians — they all saw to the bottom of things long before we in the academy began layering insights with qualifiers, footnotes and the faint aroma of career anxiety.

You can read the entire article, The Return of the Unfashionable Gods, on The Daily Sceptic.

John C.A. Manley

P.S. For more on how three famous novels, plus my not-quite-as-famous novel, have shaped our perceptions about history and humanity, check out this three-minute clip from my interview with Just Right Media — available on YouTube, BitChute and Rumble.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.