Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare by Ronald Schleifer (review)

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• Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare by Ronald Schleifer
• Shawn Normandin (bio)

Ronald Schleifer, Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Literary Studies and Well-Being reminds us what real interdisciplinary scholarship can do. While interdisciplinarity usually results in the domination of one discipline by another, this book tries to keep literary studies and healthcare in a mutually illuminating equilibrium. Ronald Schleifer channels his literary curiosity into a project enriched by his many years of teaching medical students and conducting research with healthcare professionals. But his book also presents a theory of the differences between the hard (or nomological) sciences, the social sciences, and the human sciences. As it turns out, the book is more persuasive in theorizing these differences than it is in merging healthcare and literary studies.

Schleifer’s response to the declining attractiveness of academic literary studies is to defend their practical value (30). He claims that examining the relationship between [End Page 320] healthcare and literature can enhance literary understanding (3). Though most work in the “health humanities” has focused on the ways healthcare practitioners can gain knowledge from literature, “the overall goal of Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out” because “the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself.” Foremost among these purposes is the ethical instruction resulting from the experiences afforded by literary works (3). Literature and healthcare have a common goal: to solicit “practical wisdom” (7). Chapter 1 of Literary Studies and Well-Being “defines ‘literature’ as verbal and narrative discourses, which present and provoke ‘experience’” (3). Indeed, experience is the book’s unifying concept. But it is a sophisticated concept. Involving more than immediate sensory perceptions, Schleifer’s experience is always “mediated through structures” and elicits an interpretive reaction he calls the “double-take” (23).

The second chapter provides a second introduction to Schleifer’s multifaceted argument. But the third chapter includes his best demonstration of the important role the experiential double-take plays in the humanities. He examines the shift in the history of the nomological sciences that occurred when physicists, no longer content to catalogue sense impressions, began to focus their research on the causes of such impressions. Physicists, for instance, began to conceptualize heat as measurable energy rather than a qualitative thermal experience. To better understand the reality that exists beyond our perceptions, physicists can substitute the concept of energy for heat. The human sciences, however, are preoccupied with experience as such. Consequently, they cannot just replace experience with another concept. Instead, “a disciplined account of ‘experience’ calls for a double-take on experience itself, both experience and the ‘same’ experience ‘renewed’” (77). Schleifer proposes that while the hard sciences primarily concern themselves with facts, and the social sciences concern themselves with events, the humanities study the intersections of facts and events (105).

Chapter 4 is the book’s most impressive. In these pages, Schleifer brings all his semiotic expertise to bear on the problem of facticity. He recalls that while nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century positivists privileged facts supposedly independent of any observers, Thorstein Veblen claimed “that most (if not all) phenomena we experience are ‘institutional’ facts rather than positive ‘brute’ facts” (126). Schleifer incorporates Veblen’s institutional facts into semiotics. Particularly relevant is the linguist Saussure’s distinction between meaning and value; the latter is “a relational category opposed to self-evident meaning insofar as value designates signifying differences” (128). Natural languages do not directly access brute facts; the meaning of words arises from the relationships between words, not from a direct relationship between words and nonlinguistic things. Music resembles language in this respect. Schleifer quotes the musicologist Viktor Zuckerkandl’s observation that hearing an isolated E natural would not permit the listener to determine its role within a musical piece—for example, whether it marked the piece’s resolution (129). To determine its role, one needs to hear the note in a melodic context. Schleifer argues that the human experience of music presupposes something that is...