{"id":15622,"date":"2017-01-26T18:24:25","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T18:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/news\/2017\/01\/26\/on-the-importance-of-good-literature\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T05:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T09:44:07","slug":"on-the-importance-of-good-literature","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2017\/01\/26\/on-the-importance-of-good-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"On the importance of ‘good literature’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n

Graduate student's research on Ernest Hemingway short stories leads to new perspectives<\/p>\n Sometimes, one question can make all the difference — as it did for Clark University English master’s degree<\/a> candidate Jacqueline Schnieber.\r\n\r\nDuring an independent study with Professor James Elliott <\/a>about the works of Ernest Hemingway<\/a>, specifically the Nick Adams short stories, Elliott asked her a question: Why choose to incorporate the character Bugs, a black man, into “The Battler”?\r\n\r\nIt got Schnieber thinking — she couldn’t come up with a good answer on the spot — and set a lot of things in motion.\r\n\r\n“It took me back to considering this and other stories in their historical context and why authors made the choices they did, and I was surprised to see that most criticism I have been reading similarly treated facets of the stories as simply given and not as a meaningful authorial choice,” she says.\r\n\r\nElliott’s question led Schnieber to new avenues of researching literature as a cultural product shaped by its social, historical and political environments.\r\n\r\n“Good literature will challenge you to expand your horizon or look at something from a different perspective,” says Schnieber, a Duisburg, Germany, native who earned undergraduate degrees in English and math from Ruhr-Universität Bochum<\/a> in Germany in 2014. “This is something that Hemingway’s fiction has done for me. Re-reading his short stories in particular always open up new and different ways of looking at the stories and the world around me.”\r\n\r\nShe hopes to do this for her own students and other scholars in the future as a professor and researcher.\r\n\r\n“I think the humanities have an important role to play that is often forgotten,” she says. “Much more than just reading and enjoying books, reading literature can teach us empathy and critical thinking, both of which are truly important considering current events and the political climate.”\r\n

“Good literature will challenge you to expand your horizon or look at something from a different perspective.”\r\n\r\n