November 12, 2008

Fiction and Development

Recently The Telegraph reported on the contribution fiction can make to international development, as examined by a study done by a team of scholars at Manchester University and the London School of Economics:
[Dr. Rodgers, of Manchester University's Brooks World Poverty Institude] said: "Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job – if not a better one – of representing and communicating the realities of international development.

"While fiction may not always show a set of presentable research findings, it does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does.

"And fiction often reaches a much larger and diverse audience than academic work and may therefore be more influential in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues."

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner "has arguably done more to educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan under the Taliban and thereafter than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research", said the report. (read the rest here)

I actually supervised an honours thesis in Dalhousie's International Development Studies program that examined Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South for its implicit and explicit contributions to theories of development. One source we found useful in setting up the project was Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice, which makes a related case for the potential value of literature and the "literary imagination" in developing public policy; another was an essay by Richard Horton in the TLS called "Mr. Thornton's Experiments." The risk of such analyses is that they risk reducing literary works to their social or historical content. What I've always liked about Nussbaum's work in theory is that she aspires to consider literary form, rather than to abstract social or political messages from her texts. In practice, I don't think she always manages to do this, but the idea that literary form is itself expressive of philosophical and other ideas seems to me a case she (and others including Wayne Booth) make quite convincingly. The IDS student I worked with did a good job at incorporating explicit consideration of genre and form into her analysis.

(via.)

1 comment:

lucy tartan said...

I saw that too - fascinating. I've printed a working paper version of the report and will read it next week when I've got some free time.