WONDERWORKS
The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
Pub Date: March 9th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982135-97-3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Reading good books doesn’t just entertain us; it teaches us how to better use our brains and our emotions, as this lively treatise tells us.
Fletcher, a professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, holds doctorates in both literature and neuroscience, which meet fluently in this thought-packed survey. The long-held pedagogical view of literature, he writes, has instructed us “to see literature as a species of argument.” The author believes, however, that literature is a type of technology, “any human-made thing that helps to solve a problem.” Our problem is what to do when we think about such things as love, which, in terms of the storytelling about it, involves two elements: self-disclosure and wonder, “a feeling of awe, of specialness.” A good story about love “primes the dopamine neurons in the reward centers of our brain, sweetening our thoughts with a touch of pleasure.” So it is that Sappho’s love-drenched lyrics, a Chinese ode in the Shijing, and certain poems of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman lead us to “discover wonder intimate.” There’s plenty of deep diving into the workings of the brain in discussions framed by works of literature, some well known and some not, as well as by genres. For example, horror stories “give us a fictional scare that tricks our brain into an invigorating fight-or-flight response.” That response, Fletcher recounts, implicates various parts of the body, from the hypothalamus to the kidneys, and it can yield an entertaining rush. Other emotions and mental states that are less easy to tame, such as shame, depression, and alienation, can also respond to literary prompts, yielding paranoia and anger. The trick to calming them? Maybe try reading Winnie-the-Pooh, which “instead of giving us a reason to quake at the imagination’s wilds…treats our brain’s fear regions entirely to fun."
An idiosyncratic, richly detailed, often lyrical invitation to reconsider how and why to read literature.