September 5, 2008

Education for Education's Sake

By STEVEN G. KELLMAN

That's what Stanley Fish wants, but is it possible?

To counter the old Platonic charge that poetry is mendacity, that conjuring worlds up out of words is lying, Sir Philip Sidney devised a clever strategy. The poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth," contended Sidney, relieving literature of responsibility for veracity. At the beginning of his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," Wallace Stevens declares: "I placed a jar in Tennessee," but it would be ludicrous to demand eyewitness

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