Thursday, November 13, 2008

Know Literature, Know the World


There's an interesting story in The Guardian about how reading literature can explain and communicate the world's problems better than non-fiction can.

From the piece...

Anybody who worries that they're not learning anything useful from novels can stop the hand-wringing and keep reading: a new report provides a possible salve for the guilty reader's social conscience. A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world's problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.

No comments: