10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 J ürgeN s chlaeger Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda,” Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore recently demanded, 1 thus giving new urgency to a debate which Richard Layard’s bestselling Happiness: Lessons from a New Science had started in 2005 and David Cameron, when Prime Minister, had picked up after the financial melt-down in 2007, in order to shift the benchmark for his government’s performance from GDP to GWP (General Wellbeing Product) It is obvious now, that by such a misappropriation of the concept of wellbeing, he was only trying to camouflage the further dramatic changes in social services and provisions he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer had been pushing through parliament as one of the most radical and damaging austerity programmes ever imposed upon the country Fortunately, the concept of general wellbeing as an important guideline for evaluating the quality of life in a society does not lose its legitimacy by such a single cynical misapplication 2 This is why some scholars might now have perfectly respectable reasons when they are calling for a ‘eudaimonic turn’ in literary studies, a turn which proposes to discuss the value of literature in terms of its effects on human wellbeing For, with such an agenda, they seem to do no more than to ask us as literary critics to accept a new urgency for such an issue and to join in with the effort to promote what very much looks like the time-honoured concern with human happiness If, however, we respond positively to such an invitation, it will inescapably fall upon us to probe into the deeper motivations for and benefits of such a new focus now, at this moment in time, and also into the impact of such a shift on our own teaching and research Furthermore, we have to consider what it is going to do to the standing of our field in the academic community And, last but not least, how it will change our grasp of ‘the value of literature ’ It is questions like these that I would like to ventilate in the following 1 Suzanne Moore, “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda,” The Guardian, 8 February 2020, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2020/ feb/ 08/ happiness-wellbeing-political-agenda-tories-optimism-labour, n p 2 Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005) 340 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 At first sight, the topic of this volume: ‘The Value of Literature’ seems to be very much in line with such a eudaimonic approach, because it proposes to discuss aspects of literary functions and effects that have the potential of generating or revitalising wellbeing in its readers One might add that ‘wellbeing’ has been somewhat neglected or underrated by the critical mainstream and, as a consequence, has remained by and large not only under-appreciated but also under-theorised - in other words, that a readjustment of our critical focus, as outlined above, is not only overdue, but will also help us understand more fully the benefits literature has on offer for students, readers, and (contemporary) human culture as a whole 3 Such an optimistic prediction would, however, raise a number of problems that have to be tackled before we can get more fully involved or pass judgement on the promises associated with the proposed turn The most general of these problems has also a bearing on the list of the four operative words at stake in our project: ‘attention,’ ‘empathy,’ ‘mindfulness,’ and ‘wellbeing,’ concepts that are to stand for essential aspects of human wellbeing, are incommensurate and therefore difficult to be analysed as on a level playing-field of mental activities and attitudes Attention is different from mindfulness but can also be seen as a mutually indispensable factor, if not a precondition of it Mindfulness is in some sense different from empathy but could also be seen as a mental disposition necessary for the existence of empathy; whereas an increase in wellbeing could be the overall effect of mastering the other three, but not necessarily or exclusively so There are, after all, a great many other aspects, among them social and cultural activities, that can contribute to raising the level of human wellbeing 4 3 In ancient Greek philosophy, the concept of “Eudaimonia” describes a successful life led according to the injunctions of philosophical ethics It designated a balanced, peaceful state of mind In the Christian Middle Ages, the idea was integrated into the vita contemplative-concept, so essential to the rise and expansion of monasticism The notion of a “eudaimonic turn” was recently used as the book-title for a collection of papers on The Eudaimonic Turn: Wellbeing in Literary Studies, eds. James O Pawelski/ D J Moores (Madison: Fairleigh Dickensen UP, 2013) Tellingly, Pawelski is Director of Education in Positive Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies in the University of Pennsylvania; Moores is Professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey and an expert in ecstatic poetry 4 Wellbeing and the road to human happiness have been ‘hot topics’ of philosophical ethics throughout history but have also become a particularly attractive field of research for empirically working psychologists in the last three decades We now have Ed Diener’s notion of a ‘tripartite model’ of subjective wellbeing; there is a six-factor model of psychological wellbeing, developed by Carol Ryff, and there is a host of studies that each propose variants of these models or produce their own list of factors and data, not to speak of the still growing comet tail of guidebooks and manuals about how Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 341 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 Moreover, notions and conditions of human wellbeing vary so immensely from culture to culture, epoch to epoch, and individual to individual that any attempt to restrict its condition to the importance of just three or four aspects of literary effect, in themselves difficult to measure and define, and differently weighted by different cultures and at different times, runs the risk of being considered unreasonably limiting or, in the worst case, motivated by a specific, ethically one-sided agenda. Moreover, the overarching concept of ‘wellbeing’ is in itself such a slippery, subjective, and imprecise concept for a general state of the human mind that it does not seem to lend itself very well as a starting base and reference point for a general investigation of literary effects On a less sceptical note, concentration on the beneficial impact of literature, in terms of attention, empathy, and mindfulness, if the case for their selection can be plausibly made, promises to deliver new and possibly fascinating insights into the ways literature works with and on its readers’ minds and even more generally, why human minds have made use of literature throughout history Crucial for answering the questions raised above is whether we will be able to ground our reasoning on a theory of ‘mind-work’ broad, sophisticated, flexible, and reliable enough to serve as a conceptually precise framework for specific literary investigations. And the construction of such a framework is, as we shall see, in spite of the astonishing advances in brain research, the neurosciences, and cognitive linguistics in the last decades, still full of pitfalls and altogether still a very challenging hurdle to take Furthermore, a short but careful look backwards, so sadly out of fashion these days, will show that the beneficial effects of literature in general have hardly ever been completely out of sight or disputed Exceptions existed but they always had and still have to do with religious, ideological, or political interests, which gave, and in some countries still give, the powers that be reasons for fighting literature and writers as very unwelcome thorns in their flesh. to improve one’s physical and mental wellbeing Equally, the three other operative words in our project: Attention, Empathy, Mindfulness have recently attracted interest as aspects of human behaviour that are under threat by neoliberalism and the lifestyles it has engendered Altogether, in most of these psychological studies, literature and its effects on the human mind have played no prominent role It was obviously not considered relevant or testable enough to deserve special attention In the face of literature’s undoubted importance, the challenge here is also to find out whether such neglect by empirically working psychologists is justified or not. 342 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 These hesitations and considerations take my argument to the question, what are the specific reasons for another re-focussing of our interests in the effects of literature, without doubt still one of the big, if not the biggest and most important force on the playing-fields of culture? And why restrict our investigations to attention, empathy, mindfulness, if there are so many other aspects of literary effect that one could also consider important or beneficial to the human mind, to the overall wellbeing of society, and to cultures in general? In short, is the proposed paradigm shift solely inspired by the interest to know more, or are there other motivations operating under the surface of the discourses on which we are invited to exert our critical acumen? As a consequence, if we take the bait of literary eudaimonism, we would have to tread very carefully not to be influenced by an undercurrent of contemporary pressures, needs, and preferences that will clash with our much broader cognitive remit ‘Eudaimonically’ inclined literary scholars seem to have no problem with the fact that their approach rests on a ‘positive psychology’ as a major consideration in the critical practice of the future They would admit that yes, literature has also been beneficial as long as and wherever it existed, but they might go on to claim that the ways in which literature’s character and impact has been described, analysed, and appreciated by academic criticism in the last half-century has been unduly academic, brainy, or top-heavy, i e cognitively biased and too much concerned with proving critical perspicuity and objectivity in critiquing texts, an attitude that more often than not suppresses or stifles their beneficial effects. My guess is, the questions and hesitations listed above underscore the impression that such an agenda is part and parcel of a revisionary project which is designed to show how literature can help contemporary readers and present-day cultures as a whole to better cope with the cognitively and emotionally disembedding forces shaping life in advanced societies today In this, such a project does not primarily seem to call for just another effort to analyse rationally particular aspects of literary effect from a new systematic angle, but for a fundamental re-modelling of the relationship between academic literary studies and literature in such a way that texts are selected and taught for their capacity to open up new roads for increasing or restoring wellbeing in their readers That a growing number of universities in the US and elsewhere require their teaching staff to attach a warning to the courses they offer if they think that something in the texts proposed for analysis and discussion may hurt the sensibilities of the students and may cause discomfort, is a case in point for the type of problems that could arise from such an agenda Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 343 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 So, whatever the motivations behind the call for a eudaimonic turn in approach, it will find it difficult to succeed if it fails to base its analyses on convincing models of the ways human minds develop and work: in other words, on a theory of mind-work in conjunction with a historically informed psychology that would allow us to show how literature has contributed and still does contribute to solving or, at least, mitigating a particular set of problems which impair our mind’s health and its desire for wellbeing As a strategy for a literary analysis dominated by mental health issues, it is, however, bound to get into serious trouble with some of the most cherished cornerstones of academic research: objectivity, critical distance, and a toolkit of terms and concepts that are rationally construed and intersubjectively valid Because of that, work done under the remit of a eudaimonic turn is likely to increase the risk of being slighted as not sufficiently academic or ideologically blinkered, maybe even seen as an attempt to turn academic critics into wellness-gurus or literary shrinks, a transformation, that would ultimately transform the teaching of literature into (merely) celebrating and preaching its healing power In order to achieve the desired results, i e to highlight as well as strengthen the beneficial character of particular literary texts, practising eudaimonic critics have demanded that in order to reduce the unduly limiting influence of cognitive control with its emphasis on reasoning and self-reflexive distance, the analytical focus will have to let go of the customary top-down interpretations of texts - i e of mining and retrieving, situating, categorising, sorting, structuring, explaining, and generalising the meaning-making strategies of literary texts from ‘above’ - and go for a bottom-up approach, i e for investing the literary texts under consideration with meanings and effectiveness that will allow them to more fully release their ‘eudaimonic’ potential Only in this way, it is implicitly argued, will they be able to direct and sharpen the readers’ capacity for attention, to fine-tune their ability for empathy, and to foster and strengthen their mindfulness, all of which or each separately can help to restore the health and wellbeing of their readers’ minds In such a ‘critical’ scenario, readers are configurated as victims of circumstances and patients rather than as players on fields on which texts can act out their sophisticated imaginative and intellectual training-programmes As an antidote to the over-academisation of literary studies, eudaimonic critics have also proposed a new ‘praxeological hermeneutics,’ an approach which is meant to substitute the traditional literary hermeneutics with a pragmatic approach to texts that takes them much closer to what readers and the general public really need for their own wellbeing ecology That is to say, critics who adopt such an approach are implicitly encouraged to choose lit- 344 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 erary texts and offer interpretations that will train, improve, and raise their readers’ sensibility and capacity for attention, empathy, and mindfulness, so that they are able to re-balance their minds and raise their level of comfort and happiness. I suppose, other texts that do not fit the bill or make it too difficult to elicit such an effect will just have to bide their time - probably until the next ‘turn’ appears on the horizon which will give them another critical life-line At this point in my argument about the benefits and dangers of a eudaimonic turn in understanding and analysing literature, two further questions arise that will have to be dealt with before we can dare to pass judgement on this new critical agenda: 1 Is it really true that the traditional reading practices and literary studies as a whole have missed or failed to see the power of literature to do all sorts of wonderful things to the human mind, including the ones listed in the title? Has literary studies in recent decades really been hampered by insisting too persistently that its important role within and for cultures as a whole does lie in its capacity to expose and criticise the systems of prejudices underlying literary texts, their implicit or explicit dependence or ‘take’ on some all-encompassing discourse regime, on certain aspects of the ideologically impregnated mentalities and types of behaviour which shape and govern the times and cultures out of which they arose? Has the ‘investigative slant’ of the bulk of modern criticism up till now been counter-productive for any attempt to understand the real power of literature? In short, has literary criticism, roughly from the end of World War II until today, unduly privileged literature’s position outside the life-worlds of its readers, thus accruing from it academic credentials at the expense of literature’s positive, mind-enhancing, and therapeutic potentials? 5 2 On the other hand, if we adopt the ‘praxeological agenda’ proposed by some critics, will we not inevitably run the risk of damaging the field’s standing in the academy? Might it not be that redefining the duty of literary studies as finding, identifying, or reading into literary works what we think is beneficial, therapeutic, and generally comforting will expose us to the charge that we are changing the rules of the game for a whole academic discipline whose critical efforts and academic standing has, as I have pointed out above, so far been firmly based on rational principles of analysis and analytical critiquing (critical in the sense of Kant’s first Critique, i e logical and cognitively enlightening)? After all, so the sceptics might argue, a praxeological agenda presents itself as no less than yet another effort to re-focus critical attention away from 5 For the investigative slant of much of traditional literary criticism see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015) Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 345 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 analysing texts systematically to using them for specific, time-bound, and as such limited and limiting purposes? Of course, one could see such objections and fears as yet another instance of the perennial minor squabbles in the academy if the proposed shift in angle didn’t chime in with a larger contemporary movement that is already undermining the complex systems of tests and criteria which science and scholarship have built as bulwarks against the human mind’s tendency to process information as opportunistically as possible This opportunism is an evolutionary heirloom that has programmed human minds to prefer processing information along well-trodden, familiar, commonly accepted, and as such pleasurable tracks rather than devoting time and energy to painstakingly sift and sort incoming information in accordance with scientific and rational principles of analysis. Our ability to resist this opportunism had to be developed systematically against customs and beliefs that had served the purpose of information processing and meaning-making well enough for most of human history This is also why the demands for more, or complaints about the lack of, ‘usefulness of academic studies’ are so problematic They promise to get more out of studying literary texts by making their understanding and analysis easier and more pleasurable So, ultimately, such a turn to ‘eudaimonism’ as the guiding principle of literary analysis plays into the hands of the inherited opportunism of our minds and risks what has been achieved Rather than teaching young minds that rational thinking, collecting and weighing the evidence, science and scholarship take years of training and took human society many hundreds of years to develop, the pedagogic mantra is now: find out what your mind likes and what gives you a good feeling - one could simply say, what promises to contribute to your wellbeing But mental activities that come easy are not what science and scholarship are about! And the pleasures they promise are of an entirely different kind In this context, the investigative slant of much of modern literary criticism is an integral part of what academic studies should do, and to question that or discard it completely raises the spectre of a discipline writing itself out of existence. We all know that finding out things and finding the right words and concepts to communicate what we have discovered can be an inexhaustible source of intellectual pleasure It’s simple: if you haven’t built the intellectual muscle it is difficult to enjoy the wonderful things it can do. For an academically problematic, eudaimonically inspired agenda, however, academic critics and their students might no longer feel the obligation to work very hard and remain sceptical until the end in order to produce interpretations that are based on evidence and verifiable general principles, be 346 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 they historical, structural, psychological, aesthetic, sociological, or linguistic And, ultimately even more problematic, yet another general assumption, up until now constitutive of much of the established literary studies in general, is in danger of being thrown overboard in the process: namely, that the representational strategies literary texts use as well as the effects they have on their readers’ minds are categorically distinct from effects triggered by other, non-literary cultural practices and amenities, now more varied and more easily available than ever before The distinctiveness of literature in terms of language usage and the activities of the imagination it triggers, of the way in which literature represents character, perception, feeling, and thought aesthetically, has deservedly had a solid standing in academic studies and has been a reliable litmus test for quality and seriousness A eudaimonic turn in literary studies, on the other hand, seems to plead for no less than a complete replacement of these scholarly corner stones by putting wellbeing-generating content and effects first and relegating any aspect of form and structure as their major effects on shaping and developing the mind’s (and a culture’s) capacity for perpetually revising and reshaping our imaginaries to second place Ultimately, therefore, the success of a ‘eudaimonic turn’ will depend on its ability to prove by rational analysis its claim to offer an innovative and insightful take on literary effects Again, how that can be achieved without a viable model of that mind, in other words, without a fully developed ‘theory of mind-work,’ remains an open question The outcome of any evaluation of the pros and cons of eudaimonism will naturally also depend on our understanding of the word ‘value ’ If it means evaluating in the sense of judging whether a work of literature is beneficial or not for specific cultures and readers, then an analysis of literary value can easily amount to an exercise in parading and enforcing one’s own preferences, needs, hopes, and convictions If, however, ‘The Value of Literature’ is meant to say that we have to re-double our efforts to appreciate and understand how literary texts affect the reader’s mind, its capacity for imagining, thinking, feeling, of sorting and ordering our experiences, and to make explicit and more accessible in which way specific texts have contributed and may still contribute to the general level of emotional and intellectual wellbeing within a culture, then we may be right on course to gaining a renewed and deeper appreciation of what is at stake here: creativity, open-mindedness towards a constant reconfiguration of our cultural imaginaries. In such a broad research scenario, attention, empathy, mindfulness, and wellbeing will, no doubt, play a role if they are used as relevant sign-posts and examples for our investigative focus on what really happens when we Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 347 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 write or read literary texts or when we talk to our students about literary value For effects span the whole width of mental operations, including those that texts may be able to trigger, even generations after the time and circumstances in which and for which they were written Such a project, so my guess, can only be successful if one is prepared to use the insights provided by reader response and reception theory or, if these theories are deemed insufficient and out-dated, by re-designing them with the help and on the basis of theoretical foundations that are sophisticated and plausible enough to make us see how the encounters with literary creativity in all its forms can have and have had beneficial effects on the operations of human minds, past and present. Here, unfortunately, we are confronted again with what I have already hinted at above: the still gaping lacunae in our understanding of how human brains work However rapid the advances of research into the physiology and chemistry of brain activities have been, experts we can really trust agree that we are still a long way away from fully understanding how the physiological make-up and the chemical processes underlying them can give our minds consciousness and all the other wonderful capacities needed for literature to be written and appreciated 6 As long as this problem continues to exist, we will probably gain more by reversing the direction of our own specific research interests. If we do this, there might eventually be some light at the end of the tunnel of ignorance we are still in As literary scholars, we should make full use of what has been given into our care: a priceless treasure-house of evidence for what the imagination and human creativity in general can do, what they have done, and are still doing with our language and symbol-based modelling of external and internal worlds For if we question this storehouse with its endless variations of plots and stories, rhymes and rhythms, structures and patterns, and the almost unlimited spectrum of affects it has modelled, stimulated, explored, and modified, we can use literature as a sounding board and echo chamber of what human minds need and can do, and, by implication, understand more precisely than any brain scan or imaging exercise what human minds can do and literature has done 6 A good example of the exaggerated claims about how the human mind will eventually be replaced by Artificial Intelligence is Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012) Kurzweil, after all Google’s director of engineering since 2012, happily announces there, that “[u]ltimately our brains, combined with the technologies they have fostered, will permit us to create a synthetic neocortex that will contain well beyond a mere 300 million pattern processors [as in humans] Why not a billion? Or a trillion? ” (ibid , 41) 348 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 So far, this opportunity has not been fully exploited for developing approaches that would work like intellectual ‘reverse engineering’ operations, i e for deductively constructing from the welter of historical and systematic evidence we have in hand a plausible theoretical framework and terminological toolkit for understanding how human minds work as well as for identifying, understanding, and explaining the special place the production and reception of literature fills in the overall scheme of mental operations and cultural developments So far, more often than not, conceptual work has focused on ‘the powers of the imagination,’ on defining the place of aesthetics between epistemology and ethics, on linguistic creativity, on the established categorisations of feelings and emotions, on mental models adapted from the latest developments in experimental psychology, and, most prominently, on explanatory strategies that stayed within the precincts constituted by academic studies in general, precincts that privileged reflexivity, causality, and rational reasoning, abilities on which they based their critical precision and rational reasoning Any remaining gaps were all too often filled with rhetorical acrobatics, more or less precisely understood but well-established concepts, and intelligent speculation This situation, being what it is, has frequently tempted scholars to replace rationality with ingenuity, to read into literary texts effects as the interaction of mental operations and causalities which they have not really understood and are unwilling or unqualified to explain precisely. In the eighties of the last century, with the advancement of the neurosciences, in cognitive linguistics and in empirical research methods such as imaging and computer screening, hope had grown that our understanding of how the human mind operates will soon give us a much clearer and more sophisticated theory of mind-work And there are now, indeed, aspects and developments that have brought some progress But altogether we are still a long way away from understanding what is actually going on, cognitively, emotionally, and imaginatively, in our heads when we read a piece of literature 7 7 I use ‘theory of mind’ here in a general sense as a theory of ‘how the human mind works’ rather than as the way children’s or adults’ minds imagine the minds of others There have been attempts by experimental psychologists to apply an evidence-based theory of mental operations to the reading of literary works, but the results are too basic or simplistic to make them useful for a sophisticated critical appreciation of literary works and their effects See, for instance, David Comer Kidd/ Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342 6156 (2013), 377: “Theory of Mind is the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one’s own beliefs and desires The currently predominant view is that literary fiction - often described as narratives that focus on Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 349 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 As it is, I would personally prefer to put my money on progress in the modelling of how the human mind works rather than on any colourful blurb on the computer screen But maybe one day they will help us to better understand and to present more precisely what kinds of effects literary texts can have and why Only then would it also be possible to decide responsibly in which way the reading and interpreting of literary texts can contribute to human wellbeing, to attention, empathy, and mindfulness, and much else In the meantime, there is, however, another corpus of evidence and reasoning that could help us to fine-tune our bearings in what is at stake here. This corpus consists in the history of what earlier thinkers had to say about the effects literature can have on human minds and culture in general Looking back over more than 2500 years, not only of literature performed and/ or written, but also of comments on the character and role of literary works, it becomes obvious that right from the beginning philosophers and writers have been interested in understanding what literature was doing and what kind of effects its various forms and genres were having or should have Of course, not any sort of text, but texts that they thought to be outstanding, rule-changing, and exemplary in their lasting impact on the culture and the symbol systems and ideologies their societies had adopted; texts that had demonstrably made a difference to how audiences, listeners, or, much later, educated readers saw the world and imagined themselves and their relationships with other humans in it The few statements that have come down to us from antiquity show clearly that writers and thinkers were only marginally interested in literary effects in the sense of bringing about or safeguarding wellbeing in the feel-good, narrow sense of ‘wellness’ so popular these days They were more interested in identifying the epistemological status of literary representation (mimesis or imitation) If they looked at effects at all, they were, like Aristotle, thinking in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts - can be linked to theory of mind processes, especially those that are involved in the understanding or simulation of the affective characteristics of the subjects ” Kidd and Castano provide experimental evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, in comparison to nonfiction or popular fiction, does indeed enhance the reader’s performance on theory of mind tasks. More promising has been the work done by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier See Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: OUP, 1996); Gilles Fauconnier/ Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002) For a discussion of Turner’s concept of the ‘literariness of the mind’ see: Jürgen Schlaeger/ Gesa Stedman, eds , The Literary Mind (Tübingen: Narr, 2008) Recently, Terence Cave has explored the opportunities the neuro-sciences and cognitive theory offer to our understanding of literature and what it does to the readers’ minds in his Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 2016) 350 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 about the ‘therapeutic character’ of certain literary forms such as tragedy and, maybe, about aspects of enjoyable entertainment, but not wellbeing in terms of attention, empathy, and mindfulness For Aristotle, Horace, and others, literature’s beneficial effects were socially and cognitively relevant, not a recipe for raising or strengthening individual happiness More generally, considering the range and variety of what literature has done for cultures and human minds in oral or literate cultures over more than 3000 years, what it has done to and with language and the creative potential of the human imagination, and - most relevant for our debate - how diversified the mind-changing strategies have been that literary works invented and made available, it is clear that the concern encapsulated in the eudaimonic project, if too narrowly conceived or misunderstood as a happiness remit, could easily fall into the trap of putting judgment and predilection before analysis and proof, thus seriously running the risk of ending up in an unproductive, self-serving intellectual parochialism that adds nothing of lasting importance to our understanding of what literary texts can do, but shuts out many things that literature has done and will continue to achieve Even if the eudaimonic criticial agenda of the Pawelski and Moores type would succeed in offering convincing arguments against any suspicion that it operates a narrow-minded or arbitrarily limiting notion of ‘beneficial effects’ by including some of the most disturbing and discomforting effects of literary works in their reasoning - as, for instance, Aristotle did, when he tried to define the psychological attractions of tragedy as shocking as well as ‘cathartic’ - a promising agenda for eudaimonic studies would have to be vastly broader than the list of key concepts in the title of our endeavour Maybe it would eventually have to replace the concept of wellbeing with the much broader concept of literature-specific ‘usefulness’ to do justice to the full range of what literature does with and gives to human minds To prioritise literary effects we think of as urgently needed and welcome now, at this particular moment in time and place, would then have to be specifically justified. Otherwise, literary criticism could find itself unnecessarily restricted to a regrettably narrow, time-serving way of understanding the effects of literary texts From my life-long experience as a scholar and theoretician who has seen many new critical paradigms and turns with their various claims of having broken new theoretical, ethical and/ or political-correctness-ground come and go, I am naturally sceptical towards any new approach claiming the moment has now arrived in which we are able to clearly see a way out of the confusing mess of conflicting approaches, priorities, and evaluations because we have, so the implicit promise, now a position in sight that will finally get it right and do equal justice to the hitherto irreconcilable claims between rational analysis Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 351 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 and social as well as emotional needs, individual aspirations and experiential pressures, historical facts and historicising interpretations, economic necessities and imaginative freedom, work and leisure, reason and desire Recently, the reading of longer texts such as novels has been said to be an efficient antidote against the short-termism, reduction of attention-span, and informational overload of the digital age and against the damage it is doing to attention, mindfulness, and ultimately empathy, too, because novels are able to help our over-stressed minds and narcissistic egos to retrieve their bearings and strengthen their capacity for building and fortifying barriers against the multiplying opportunities and challenges of life in our times How eudaimonic criticism can play a successful part in such an effort to cool down, appease, and manage today’s often over-heated mental conditions without losing too many other equally important aspects of literary value and effect remains to be seen 8 In this context, it does not seem too far-fetched to argue that our project’s agenda is obviously inspired, though indirectly, by the present-day popularity of ecological ways of thinking, arguing, and reacting to the deplorable state of our planet and of human affairs Such thinking with its fascinating imaginative transfer from the state of nature to the state of the human mind is driven by the conviction that the human mind is just as over-exploited, fundamentally disturbed, and out of balance as our natural habitat, and is, therefore, like the natural surroundings we live in and of, in urgent need of regaining its sustainability In this, our project is clearly in line with one of the signature tunes of our times It seems to presuppose that, just as nature and its bio-topical equilibria have been upset beyond repair by our mindless exploitation, so the human mind and its ‘natural’ balance is said to be now under a similar threat by man’s own doing The ‘doing’ is, in our case and academically speaking, holding desperately fast to critiquing standards in which our minds can no longer find the regenerating qualities so desperately needed now For all this, the world-wide popularity of the term ‘human resources’ for human beings underscores how derailed human society is and how wonderfully revealing language can be In an ecological scenario our minds will, if we are not careful, suffer the same sort of lasting damage as nature It is therefore high time and, maybe, nearly too late to prevent the worst This may well be the case, but before one can turn a conceptual parallelism into a plausible basis for action or a 8 S Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (London: Atlantic Books, 2015); Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on our Brains (London: Rider, 2014) 352 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 new approach to interpret literary texts, more work is needed For, however revealing such a parallelism may be, it should not be taken as a fact or an answer, but merely as a door-opener for investigating what is at stake for the role of literature and literary criticism in today’s world More specific and relevant to our topic here and even more pertinent to the questions it asks, much of the ecologically inspired criticism, with all its acumen and self-reflexivity, so far seems to have by-passed the fact that literature has, as long as it has existed, provided humans with an ever larger range of experimental laboratories for testing and improving their mind’s capacity and willingness to adapt to and accommodate new experiences and challenges Among the abilities needed for such an adaptability are, it is true, a healthy capacity for attention, mindfulness, and empathy But it is also important to realise that our over-stressed cultures, in reaction to this situation, have also been developing an ever more varied and all-encompassing array of non-literary therapeutic practices for dealing with the problems so typical of our post-industrial societies The enormous increase in the number of people working as psychotherapists, mentors, coaches, and similar professions, an increase paralleled by a rapidly widening range of available programmes and offers for mental support, speaks volumes So, the question is more urgent than ever before: What does literature and literary criticism have to offer today that these practices cannot do? To repeat, in view of these problems, there is a real danger that literature, its reading, interpreting, and understanding, will, in the hands of eudaimonically inclined critics, be instrumentalised to become a supposedly easily available means for a do-it-yourself literature-based therapy that is designed to teach readers and students how one can, by reading and digesting particular works of literature in particular ways, live a more peaceful, stress-free, and well-balanced, in short, happier life With such a remit it is unavoidable to ask: What would that do to the legitimacy of the claim that analysing and understanding literature has earned a permanent place in academic institutions? And what will happen if it turns out that what our imbalanced minds now need most urgently is not a return to a supposedly balanced natural state with the help of a eudaimonic approach to literature but entirely new ways of managing our often worrying as well as exhilarating, culture-specific dysfunctionalities? The answer to these questions must surely be ambivalent Some works of literature can indeed be said to elicit specific therapeutic effects, but unless we can say how exactly they achieve that and what we as responsible scholars and teachers can contribute to promote such therapeutic readings without distorting or contaminating what the texts actually are designed for or do, Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 353 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 we have to tread very carefully not to lord the text’s ingenuity over with our own desires and critical acumen 9 In the end, the general optimistic expectation behind a wellbeing agenda sounds almost too good to be true, and it may not be long before the academic community realises that they have yet another critical fashion with a very limited sell-by date on their hands A utopian vision is always nice to have and even psychologically helpful for a future-directed optimism, but a dream is a dream, and wishful thinking is wishful thinking Any interpretative strategy that tends to functionalise literary works for ‘eudaimonic’ purposes, against their main drift or message, is likely to suffer the fate of many of its predecessors For, in the process of carefully reading and commenting on literary works, it will soon become obvious that most of them do not lend themselves at all easily to any reductionist functionalisation of their effect-spectrum, however urgent the desire may be for extracting from them the desperately needed dose of comfort And again, without a plausible theory of mind, such a project is bound to operate in a theoretical void with a concept of reader response and effect that will have serious problems when it comes to accommodating individual differences in character, needs, cultural backgrounds, and reading habits To put literature to good use, i e show how it is able to teach us what we don’t know or are in need of in a particular historical situation, at any particular time and moment of cultural development, is, no doubt, an honourable mission, but whether a choice of a eudaimonic angle can do justice to the immense range of what literary texts have done and are still doing to minds is more than questionable and might, moreover, in some cases encourage selections of texts that do not represent the best ever written After all, analysing, understanding, and appreciating all types of literature as objectively as we can has rightly earned us a place as a recognised university discipline and that should remain so To put the issues discussed here once more in a broader historical context, another short look back may also help to further clarify what the opportuni- 9 There are literary genres that are designed to stimulate attention but lack the mindfulness and empathy side of literary effects, as, for instance, cloak and dagger or horror novels There are also types of literature that are built around empathy as, for instance, the sentimental novels of the late 18th century (with Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, pubished 1771, as a typical example) But whether this type of literature is particularly suited to produce or increase wellbeing in its readers is debatable, not to speak of its effect on attention There are characters in novels that show a high degree of mindfulness but are experienced by other characters as oppressive and meddling Again, it is doubtful whether any long narrative can be read as an encouragement to be mindful all the time. Oblomovs do not only occur in fiction but also among readers! 354 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 ties and risks of a eudaimonic turn are, and whether such a turn is likely to open up truly new enlightening avenues for our understanding of literature or, more broadly, the human mind Until the ‘Romantic revolution,’ the Horatian dictum that it was literature’s task to be useful and to give pleasure (prodesse aut delectare) was widely accepted and neither of these two conceptual pillars referred in any precise therapeutic sense to literature as a source of mental health or balance Thinking about literature was rather dominated by interest in the nature of the realities represented - one would say today, by ethical and ontological issues, rather than by considerations of effect In the Middle Ages and for a considerable time afterwards, ontological issues were inextricably bound up with moral and religious issues, and effects, if they were mentioned at all, tended to be seen as emotional and, therefore, dangerous or in a merely ancillary function As the natural, ‘fallen’ world was “brazen,” poetry was expected to give humans an idea of a perfect world by delivering a “golden” version of it, so Philip Sidney in his An Apology for Poetry, published posthumously in 1595 To create images of an idealised reality, a world liberated from the contaminations of sin, and in line with God’s moral injunctions and promises, was considered the task and duty of poets well into the 18th century Usefulness in this sense was seen as the master function of literary texts, and the pleasure they caused as secondary Helping readers or listeners to image a reality and human existence that Christian belief promised for life after death was considered its main concern Against this background, today’s eudaimonism seems to be somehow also a contemporary secularised version of this time-honoured concept The Romantic revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a radical break-away from representation (mimesis) and usefulness as explanatory hubs of traditional poetics by radically relocating the focus of attention to the feelings and intuitions of particularly sensitive human individuals 18th century epistemological empiricism and aesthetics (Locke, Shaftesbury, Lord Kames, and others) had prepared the ground by replacing the principles defining and justifying the traditional hierarchy of genres through levels of styles, with a realignment of the hierarchy of themes and genres according to their emotional effects. They redefined, for instance, the category of the beautiful in art and poetry as causing pleasurable, enjoyable emotions, and, by adopting Longinus’ definition, the Sublime as a category that defined objects and actions with the capacity to disturb and shock the human mind into awe and visionary revelation The romantics radicalised this new approach by making the inner self of the creative individual the main stage for how poetry could help human minds Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 355 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 to find their way back to their natural state of innocence. Wordsworth, one of the founding fathers of English Romanticism, saw the value of poetry in its capacity to grasp and express poetically the inner reactions to experience in natural surroundings and set it off against a self that was alienated from its true natural condition by civilisation In this way, romantic poetry was designed to heal the rift between the natural self and a self distorted by the pressures of change and accelerated social upheaval in the run-up to the industrial revolution. True poetry, defined by him as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity,” 10 was also deliberately set off against the neo-classicist obsession with rules that had still been strongly defended by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, the critical lawmakers of the 18th century Wordsworth criticised the traditional cannon of rules as a terrible mistake distracting attention from what was natural and really needed For him, poetry had to play a decisive role in enacting what Rousseau’s “retour à la nature” had demanded: a return to a supposedly innocent, natural state as a bulwark against the soul-destroying forces of modernisation. For the first time in history, poetry was thus recruited for therapeutic purposes It was designed to heal the chasm progress had opened up between the natural state of the human mind and the disrupting demands and pressures of modern life It would, however, be naive to believe that what the Romantics did was initiating ‘a return to nature’ as a state of affairs that had really existed before civilisation destroyed it, just as it seems to have been naive to believe that the task of poetry lies in presenting an idealised world free of sin But if we had to choose between these two venerable historical models as blueprints for a contemporary approach with a eudaimonic agenda, we would find it difficult to decide What speaks, however, in favour of the romantics as models for it, is their fundamental belief that there is a natural state, a state of innocence, of balance and happiness, to which the world and human affairs have to be brought back with the help of literature The romantics produced astonishingly moving and beautiful poems to make their point, but they also pamphleteered insistently to win over a sceptical readership Talent, devotion to the cause, and hard 10 In his seminal Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, William Wordsworth defined “all good poetry” as “the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings […] recollected in tranquillity” thus deliberately setting off his own and S T Coleridge’s contributions to their experimental collection of ballads and poems against the prevailing styles and themes In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845), ed A J George (Boston: DC Heath, 1892), 25 See also Jürgen Schlaeger, Imitatio und Realisatio: Funktionen poetischer Sprache im Klassizismus und in der Romantik (München: Fink 1974), 93-109 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 356 J ürgeN s chlaeger work eventually fulfilled the prophecy. Later in life, Wordsworth achieved prominence as the “Great Healer; ” Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron all died young as legendary martyrs to the cause and were accorded in literary history the status of self-sacrificing geniuses, or, in the case of Wordsworth, who lived to the age of 80, the accolade of a visionary sage So, however faked the claims of the Romantics that they had recovered the true shape and character of innocent humanity might sound now, the movement has left indelible and very valuable traces in the European imaginary Its legacy still has something important to offer to us in terms of attitudes, emotions, self-perception as well as of modes of expression and experience of nature With it, it added something irreplaceable to Europe’s medicine cabinet of spiritual relief and comfort 11 The spirit of the ecological movement today seems to pick up the Romantic impulse of setting what is considered natural and original against their opposites, and of promising relief and an escape route from the increasing alienation of humanity from its natural condition, demanding again some sort of return to a natural state, which, of course, never existed in the way the Romantics imagined it and is probably just another utopian projection rather than a guideline for our future now Again, an intellectual movement seems to be on the rise as a reaction to developments that have seriously upset the ecological balance within nature and in the human mind Whether, in view of this situation, a eudaimonic approach, fuelled by a positive psychology, will play a prominent role in the efforts to stem the disrupting forces of the modern world, remains to be seen After all, the Romantics did not stop the developments they revolted against, but nevertheless offered the imagination of their contemporaries and of future generations something to draw lasting pleasure and comfort from They have not made the world a better place, but the minds of men immensely richer ones Their efforts did not heal the rifts caused by industrialisation and modernisation They did not turn the world into the humane and well-balanced natural habitat they had imagined, but they left Western, increasingly individualised cultures a valuable legacy which readers can still use and fall back on if they feel the need to imagine a world they could love and live in, content and at peace with themselves, their natural surroundings and their fellow human beings Sadly, cultural anthropology has made it all 11 “Every great and original writer […] must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished,” Wordsworth, Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807, Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845), ed A J George (Boston: DC Heath, 1892), 99 See also Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Theory 1790-1850, (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019) Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 357 too obvious that there is no point of origin or innocence to which advanced societies can return if they feel they are about to lose their bearings But, in view of the high stakes eudaimonic criticism is claiming now for its own efforts, one has to realise that two hundred years ago, the achievements of the romantics took a handful of very talented and determined young poets and revolutionary thinkers “to create the taste by which” 12 a large readership eventually came to take in and enjoy what they had on offer Compared with this scenario, the call for a eudaimonic critical agenda, as part of a ‘positive psychology’ seems to be only a feeble postscript to what the Romantics were determined to do and what they achieved Compared with their enthusiasm, the chances that the expectations and promises that come with a new approach to understanding and using literary texts as sources of wellbeing, are, it seems, not overwhelming Its claims would be much stronger in substance and impact, if the project would have the support of a new generation of writers and original thinkers who would not just tell their readers and students how they have to interpret literary works, but would produce creative work that can open up their readers’ imagination to new dimensions of thought and feelings, expressions and attitudes Without such support, the effects academically identified and extracted from literary texts by eudaimonic critics will not make much of a difference Altogether, whether literary texts, with the help of academic criticism, can do now more for us than the Romantics achieved with their poetic talent and their personal enthusiasm: i e actually stop, revert, or at least slow down and compensate imaginatively the dis-embedding effects of rapid technological and social change, is questionable After all, the romantics left us beautiful poems of lasting value and influence, fought for their convictions as thinkers, pamphleteers and revolutionaries, whereas 21st century critical eudaimonism seems to do little more than hold out the promise of rebalancing our minds and increase our wellbeing by teasing out some of the invigorating and healing powers of literature Maybe it is worth trying, but if the trying involves throwing the baby - our baby - out with a bathwater, we better hedge our bets 12 Wordsworth, Letter, 99 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 Works Cited Cave, Terence Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism Oxford: OUP, 2016 Fauconnier, Gilles/ Mark Turner The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities New York: Basic Books, 2002 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015 Greenfield, Susan. Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on our Brains London: Rider, 2014 Keen, Andrew The Internet Is Not the Answer London: Atlantic Books, 2015 Kidd, David Comer/ Emanuele Castano “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind ” Science 342 6156 (2013), 377-380, https: / / science sciencemag org/ content/ 342/ 6156/ 377 Accessed 10 May 2020 Kurzweil, Ray How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed New York: Viking Penguin, 2012 Layard, Richard Happiness: Lessons from a New Science New York: Penguin, 2005 Moore, Suzanne “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda ” The Guardian, 8 February 2020, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2020/ feb/ 08/ happiness-wellbeing-political-agenda-tories-optimism-labour Accessed 10 May 2020 Pawelski, James O / D J Moores, eds The Eudaimonic Turn: Wellbeing in Literary Studies Madison: Fairleigh Dickensen UP, 2013 Pladek, Brittany The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Theory 1790-1850 Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019 Schlaeger, Jürgen Imitatio und Realisatio: Funktionen poetischer Sprache im Klassizismus und in der Romantik. München: Fink, 1974 Schlaeger, Jürgen/ Gesa Stedman, eds The Literary Mind Tübingen: Narr, 2008 REAL 24 Sidney, Philip An Apology for Poetry (1595) University of Michigan, 1965 Turkle, Sherry S Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012 Turner, Mark The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language Oxford: OUP, 1996 Wordsworth, William Letter to Lady Beaumont. May 21, 1807 In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845). Ed A J George Boston: DC Heath, 1892 --- “Preface, 1800-1845 ” In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845). Ed A J George Boston: DC Heath, 1892, 95-100 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 358 J ürgeN s chlaeger