What if literature isn’t only a means of gaining cultural awareness, but a way to discover who we are and who God is?
What if literature’s spiritual impact were a legitimate topic of study among literary scholars and not only the concern of theologians?
What if we approach literary engagement not as a mere escape from reality, but as a means of actually accessing hidden dimensions of reality?
There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of which he alone was aware. – Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
When a reader encounters great literature, a mysterious exchange occurs. A mere arrangement of words can evoke joy, hope, empathy, or transcendence. All readers recognize the power of stories to transport us to other cultures and experiences—but can fiction also elicit experiences that form us spiritually? Dennis Kinlaw, an Associate Professor of English and director of The Honors Institute at Erskine College, contends it does, and his work seeks to find out how and to what effect.
“As someone who has had these experiences, and who works with students who are constantly having these experiences, I was puzzled by why we weren’t talking about them and trying to make sense of them, even at a psychological level, to say nothing about thinking about the theological dimensions.”
For decades, literary theorists have studied texts through the eyes of imaginary readers—theoretical constructs rather than real people. Kinlaw’s project, on the other hand, aims to capture an array of responses from actual readers.
With funding from Templeton Religion Trust, Kinlaw’s project pairs traditional methods such as close reading and reader analysis with empirical study methods borrowed from sociologists and psychologists to analyze literature’s spiritual effects within the lives of readers. At the outset, the project asks experiential questions: What books have elicited a sense of the numinous or divine? What books have altered readers’ understanding of who God is and of what spirituality is, and how has that manifested itself in their lives?
“Arguments for the importance of literature that are grounded in historical and theoretical claims are not in themselves adequate,” Kinlaw asserts. “The actual impact of literature on the lives of diverse readers—young and old, religious and irreligious, common and erudite—must be measured. The reader matters when we try to make sense of the power of a text.”
The main challenge of the study, in Kinlaw’s view, may very well be overcoming a pattern he’s noticed in his discipline: questions of spiritual significance are largely exiled to religious studies or theology departments and not investigated in earnest from a cross-disciplinary standpoint.
“There is a suspicion that the questions this project is asking aren’t appropriate for literary scholars to engage, that they are to be kept within the realm of the personal, not within the public scholarly domain.” However, Kinlaw insists, “Questions of spiritual transformation must not be ignored in avoidance of the unknown morass of religious experience or in favor of more established psychological domains.”
An additional goal of the study is field expansion. Kinlaw hopes the introduction of practical tools and vocabularies from other disciplines into the project will not only lead to better insights but will also grow the field of literary studies. “I think one of the challenges and virtues of this type of research project is that it requires us to think across disciplines. Even within literary studies, we’re being challenged to be more collaborative, and to return to the idea of the reader as a real place of unexplored depth.”
Dennis Kinlaw’s project proposes that works of fiction are more than a medium of giving ourselves cultural awareness of those who came before us, but also of discovering who we are—and who God is. If engaging with literature is one way we access spiritual realms and understanding, then we need to take fiction much more seriously. By approaching literary engagement not as a mere escape from reality, but as a means of accessing hidden dimensions of reality, we make spiritual understanding not only possible but probable.
