583. Reflections on Literature's Enduring Role in Human Experience feat. Arnold Weinstein

Sep 11, 2025

Arnold Weinstein, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Brown University and author, shares his insights on how literature deepens our self-understanding and empathy. He discusses how reading engages the body and emotions in ways other art forms do not. Arnold also explores the transformative power of discomfort in literature, emphasizing its role in introspection. The conversation highlights literature's enduring relevance and its ability to reveal the complexities of human identity, challenging the undervaluation of literary studies in academic environments.

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INSIGHT

Reading Enters Other Minds

Reading makes ancient or distant voices feel contemporary and offers unique access to other subjectivities.
Literature expands who we are by letting us inhabit minds and hearts beyond our own experience.

INSIGHT

Words Create Interpretive Openness

Written texts preserve multiplicity because words carry layered meanings that readers activate.
Unlike film or painting, literature leaves interpretive openness that engages readers' imagination.

ANECDOTE

Twinhood Shaped His Lens

Arnold describes growing up as an identical twin and being routinely indistinguishable from his brother.
That experience shaped his lifelong interest in entering other consciousnesses through literature.

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How does literature enrich our understanding of ourselves and of others, in ways that STEM fields and other forms of knowledge cannot? What is contained within the language of reading that you don't encounter with other art forms like painting or film?

Arnold Weinstein is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of several books. His latest two publications are The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing and Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books.

Greg and Arnold discuss how literature offers unique and invaluable insights into the human experience, bridging historical and cultural divides. Their conversation examines the connections between literature and self-discovery, the challenges of teaching literature in a contemporary academic setting, and the enduring relevance of classic works from authors like William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, and Mark Twain.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Life doesn’t come in disciplines

01:02:54: Literature helps you see history. That philosophy, et cetera, needs a good dosage of literature, which is why we created that course and let the disciplines—not the people, the disciplines themselves—do battle with each other. And there's no obvious answer here. There's no winner or loser. But the students were confused. They wanted to get what's the right take on this. Well, has anybody ever offered the right take on reality? Universities come packaged in disciplines. Life doesn't. It doesn't. All of our major problems cannot be solved with any single discipline, including economics and, you know, and coding.

Literature makes us more human

09:25: It's a good workout to read literature. It makes us more generous, as being able to award the notion of humanity to other people. Because I do not think you can kill them. You cannot stamp them out if you do not think back.

Why great books leave you uneasy

30:13: We are supposed to exit literature course, not exactly being more confused, but more embattled in a sense to see that other ways of being, as well as other ways, other values that people might have, is a kind of absolutely basic "meat-and-potatoes" element of human life. You cannot just live in your own silo, in your own scheme, even though you are locked in it. That's the point. We cannot exit ourselves.

History isn’t a fairy tale

40:51: If we read the books, it only tells us what we want to know, which is what we are headed towards in this society today with the current political scene. Any text that is critical of American history is considered broke and therefore removed. And I'm worried that we are going to get a generation of people who think that American history is a fairy tale, which it is not, and no amount of rhetoric can change that. That we can police and prohibit these certain kinds of texts can take over the Kennedy Center, but we cannot, in fact, change what all of that is about, which is that we are still paying the bill for the history of racism and slavery in this country. It is not solved. We can just try to put it under the rug, but it is not solved by any means. So it is in that sense that the discomfort is required. If it simply massages us, say, "oh, this is terrific," then I think we are reading the wrong book.

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