In Defence of the Imagination

"Learned, lucid, fearless, and funny."--New Yorker

A spirited indictment of overinterpretation from the grand dame of English literary criticism.

"Minds, like doors and mouths, are made to shut as well as to open," quips Helen Gardner in her 1979-1980 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. A vigorous and elegant champion of traditional literary values, Gardner takes aim here at what she sees as a creeping subversion of these values as a "whirl of new doctrines" sweeps through the academy. Deconstruction, the Nouvelle critique, antithetical reading: all these exalt the open-ended interpretations of the theorist and the reader above the work of literature itself. They ask for "a mind so open that it cannot ever be shut on anything."

In Defence of the Imagination is not, then, a defense of the reader's right to "import meanings" to the text. Rather it is a defense of the imaginative and intellectual work it takes to understand literature as the author wrote it. It takes imagination to interpret a poem in light of an author's biography, or to grasp in a deep way the traditions that shaped an individual novel. Still, Gardner believes that the value of literary tradition remains, in an important sense, objective. Giving too much license to readers, whether by assigning only "relevant" contemporary novels to undergraduates or radically reinterpreting Shakespeare's plays to pander to modern sensibilities, dulls our ability to truly inhabit the literary past and impoverishes our own world in the process.

Pugnacious and charming in equal measure, In Defence of the Imagination ultimately affirms the value of a life devoted to the study of literature. Gardner's own lucidity, range of reference, and passionate concern for reading are in themselves powerful affirmations of her argument.