Professor Looks at How Novels Reflect Our Society

If you've ever been in a literature class and wondered, "Why do I have to read this book?" one Purchase professor provides a very simple answer: Reading is exercise for the brain.

"Neurologically, the more complexity the brain can handle, the more alive and acute it is," explains Professor of Literature Nina Pelikan Straus. "The novel is like living a life you can experiment with. It sharpens your brain, and the more connections you make in your brain, the stronger it is."

"The gap between academia and society is getting larger," Straus said. "A lot of people are saying the liberal arts that we knew 20 to 30 years ago are disintegrating, they're dying. What I'm interested in for freshman students is giving them some background to some major contemporary trends and the history behind them."

Through the lens of Eastern European writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka, Straus engages students in a dialogue about the culture of the Cold War, Marxism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"I'm interested in novels that give a picture of society and people thinking through ideologies," she said.

"Novels such as Kafka's The Trial help students understand something about the way societies will brainwash people. We understand this from the point of view of an exaggerated, dramatized character. There are elements of tyranny, brainwashing and conformity, and this allows your brain to have had an experience, not directly with life, but imaginatively."

"If you don't deal with complexity, you'll simplify things, and be prone to simplified ways of thinking. That's tyranny's favorite drink," she said.

Straus views some aspects of the current "Great Recession" as indicative of a panic in the U.S. to maintain the materialistic and arguably conformist cultural values that peaked during the 1980s. 

Noting a piece by Tony Judd in the New York Review of Books, she believes he was correct in writing that the Reagan era "made it easy for people who knew how to make money to do it." Thus money and materialism became the standard of values while other values, such as honoring intellectuals and investing in the arts, were "subsumed under this umbrella."

"The idea of the elite has been eroded, it's the financial elite now," she said. "The Post World War II generation had it easy. There were lots of jobs and lots of money, but now it's contracting. People are now concerned with making money and getting ahead, and they're very anxious about it."

Straus has made similar cultural observations in her writings. In "From Dostoevsky to Al-Qaeda: What Fiction Says to Social Science," she compares Dostoevsky's novel Demons to portrayals of Osama bin Laden in various analyses and media portrayals. 

She writes, "Dostoevsky’s novel probes fantasies that those who seek to understand terrorism now approach via social science. What can a novel of 1872—written by a 'cruel talent' who, it is said, reveled in the evils he described—tell us about terror that social science cannot?"

"If you don't know the past, you're probably prone to repeat it," Straus said. "But if you do know the past, you understand the way that people, for example, in times of crisis, tend to hook on to simple answers and scapegoat each other."