Engineers of the human soul: readers, writers, and their political education

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the light of recent attempts to construct ‘literature pedagogy’ for cosmopolitan, ‘globalizing’, political ends, this article provides here some stark reminders about the educational, not to say political, risks of confining the aims and purposes of literature to the aims and purposes of politics, or using a literary-political aesthetic as pedagogy. Such confinement occurs when literature pedagogy is put in the service of political doctrine. Even when this is undertaken through the guise of seemingly laudable moral intentions – to serve, for example, Enlightenment-derived goals of equality, fraternity, justice, or their modern guise of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism – the well-intentioned ethical premises of such literature pedagogy, it is argued, limits political horizons, narrows educational outlooks and reduces aesthetics to ideology. Drawing on a variety of historical exemplars, the article details a range of attempts politically to educate and influence readers and writers through literature. Deriving its title from Stalin’s diktat that artists should be ‘engineers of the human soul’, the article argues for an opening out not a closing down of hermeneutical horizons.