Literature and Rigid Thinking

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Want someone to get past their rigid thinking and increase their openness? Put a novel in their hands. Canadian researchers say it will help them become more sophisticated thinkers and increase their creativity.  

University of Toronto students were asked to read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. Afterward, they each filled out a survey to measure the desire for certainty and stability. The short story readers had much lower scores on that test than those who read the essays. The fiction readers showed they needed less order and had more comfort with ambiguity. This was particularly true for participants who already read regularly.  

Writing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers say, “Exposure to literature may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” 

Fiction readers can more easily follow thinking styles that differ from their own—they can feel along with characters they may not even like—gaining a better understanding of the viewpoint. 

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

Literature as antidote

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Poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the Russian imperialist way of thinking. The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression.

Mikhail Shishkin writing in The Atlantic