Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Is György Lukács an interesting thinker? Lukács is, to me, the most interesting Marxist critic, except for Marx. What Lukács understood was — Lukács wrote a book, which I think has one of the dullest titles you can imagine, called History and Class Consciousness. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács gave an analysis of institutional history. Fundamentally, it’s one of my basic concepts and understanding of the world. He says that humans create an institution, you can say, it’s the legal system for a social use called justice. As the legal system develops and develops and begins to find a way of becoming internally consistent, it has less and less to do with justice because it’s more concerned, in a sense, about being a self-contained, rational enterprise. I think that literary studies in the university reached this point maybe 50 years ago, where, in creating internal cohesion and internal structure, they had less and less to do with literature and almost nothing to do with the human purposes of literature. Also, Lukács’s analysis of the 19th-century novel is fantastic. I reread him a few weeks ago, his discussion of Tolstoy and Balzac, and I found it absolutely illuminating. His piece on Dostoyevsky, too. What’s your favorite Tolstoy short story or short fiction?…

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