This week, I finished Alan Jacobs’s provocative A Theology of Reading.
This is a book I’ve needed to read. Last week, I wrote a statement about faith integration for a promotion application, and the book’s refrains of love and generosity were ringing in my ears. Jacobs explores the way our readings can change over time, exemplified by a detailed examination of WH Auden’s relationship to Soren Kierkegaard (probably my favorite part of the book). And most of all the book gave me some follow-up reading; the book convinced me to return to John Milbank and (especially) Mikhail Bakhtin.
The book also left me with a question. At the book’s close, Jacobs examines Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and its satirical take on the “institutionalization of charity,” a dangerous pitfall if one substitutes a bureaucratized love for one a personally vulnerable one. Jacobs turns his eye to the academy at the book’s conclusion, but I was left wondering about another extension of Jacobs’s insight.
As an English professor, I feel conflicted about the fact that I am part of the institutionalization of literature and of a certain kind of reading.
My question then: is this kind of “institutionalization” a potential problem?
Does it contribute to the analogous problems as charity’s institutionalization?
If so, what are some ways we can combat those potential problems?
