Episode 251: Why Literature Still Matters with Dr. Jason Baxter

This week on The Literary Life Podcast we are pleased to bring you a conversation hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks had with Dr. Jason Baxter, author of the new book Why Literature Still Matters from Cassiodorus Press. You can find out more about Dr. Baxter and his other books at JasonMBaxter.com. Together they discuss how this book came about and the importance of knowing who your audience is. They share some hopes for this book to reach those who don’t understand why literature is still worthwhile in our current culture. Angelina brings up the challenges of reading in this fast-paced, consumeristic age. Jason uses metaphors of gardening and learning a piece of music to think about reading and understanding as a process requiring time and perseverance.

Join us at HouseofHumaneLetters.com for Thomas’ next webinar with Michael Williams on the life of Saint Therese of Liseux.

Listen to The Literary Life:

Commonplace Quotes:

When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.
Wendell Berry, from “A Consent“

There had never been a time when beauty had been to so large an extent the handmaid of commerce.
Esme Wingfield-Stratford, from The Victorian Cycle

So desperate at times appears the condition of our work that it seems as if only a miracle could save us. We forget that in art we have at hand the perpetual possibility of such a miracle. Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach–whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, and make us over into something more nearly in its own image.
Harold Goddard, from The Meaning of Shakespeare

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Book List:

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

“De Descriptione Temporum” by C. S. Lewis

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

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