What is literature? For much of western history, the word simply designated “educated writing” or “discourse,” a meaning it still retains. However, since the turn of the nineteenth century, literature has usually meant “imaginative writing,” and some kinds of literature, like the genre of romance, is more, shall we say, “literary” than others, more rooted in imaginative flights of fancy. Our guest is Scott Black, Professor of English literature and chair of the English department at the University of Utah. Professor Black is the author of Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction, published in 2019 by the University of Virginia Press, and it makes the compelling case that literature, especially in its most playful, most unrealistic, most imaginative, most romantic forms is precisely what we need today.
Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center
Produced and Edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob
What do we need in violent times? Stronger weapons systems? Better intelligence so that we can root out threats before they arise? A more...
Scotland is a small nation that has exerted an outsized influence on the modern world, an influence ranging from politics and economics, to university...
Poetry represents perhaps the most elegant use of language, the most delicate expression of the wide range of moods and feelings that make us...
