Libraries and Social Responsibility: A National Conversation - Background Reading

As I mentioned in my previous post we will be sharing some pre-readings leading up to the conference that will provide some context for our conversation on June 2^nd. The following is an excerpt from The Educated Imagination, Indiana University Press; 1964. While the excerpt is short in length it is much longer in contemplation especially when considering the role of libraries in educating the imagination?

See you 13 days.

Blythe, Jason, Nancy

Northrop Frye

1912 - 1991

Northrop Frye; internationally recognized Canadian literary critic. Frye’s writings contributed significantly to literary study after World War II. Frye is concerned with the relationship of literature to society, the role of the literary critic, and the interaction between the individual reader and whatever is being read.

The search for meaning

Let us suppose that some intelligent man has been chasing status symbols all his life and suddenly the bottom falls out of his world and he sees no reason for going on. He can’t make his solid gold Cadillac represent his success or his reputation or his sexual potency any more:

now it seems to him only absurd and a little pathetic. No psychiatrists or clergyman can do him any good, because his state of mind is neither sick nor sinful: he’s wrestling with his angel. He discovers immediately that he wants more education, and he wants it in the same way that a starving man wants food. But he wants education of a particular kind. His intelligence and emotions may quite well be in fine shape. It is his imagination that’s been starved and fed on shadows, and it’s education in that that he specifically wants and needs. - p. 150

What has happened is that he’s so far recognized only one society, the society he has to live in, the middle-class twentieth century society that he sees around him. That is, the society he does live in is identical with the one he wants to live in. So all he has to do is adjust to that society, to see how it works and find opportunities for getting ahead in it. Nothing wrong with that: it’s what we all do. But it’s not all of what we all do. He’s beginning to realize that if he recognizes no other society except the one around him, he can never be anything more than a parasite on that society. And no mentally healthy man wants to be a parasite: he wants to feel that he has some function, something to contribute to the world, something that would make the world poorer if he weren’t in it. But as soon as that notion dawns in the mind, the world we live in and the world we want to live in become different worlds. One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination, yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its

shape. This second world is the world we want to live in, but the word “want” is now appealing to something impersonal and unselfish in us. -p.150-151