By Claudia Moscovici

Albert Einstein famously stated, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This standard of simplicity generally applies to Physics and high-level mathematics, fields that value “elegant proofs,” which are concise, intuitive, unifying, generalizable and original. But we can apply this principle, at least by analogy, to the arts and humanities, and above all to accessible fields such as literature. I say literature above all, because reading novels, poetry and plays is most of all about engaging in the incomparable escape and pleasure of imagination, which are universal. Anissa Trisdianty is quoted as saying “Reading is dreaming with your eyes open.” Indeed, literature occupies a unique place among the arts in awakening our imaginations, as its form of creativity depends on the active participation of the reader. The business of publishing, who writes books and for what purposes has changed dramatically over time. But one thing remains the same: we still love to read books for pleasure, not just for educational or pragmatic purposes. Whatever form they may take–paperback, hardcover, e-books or audio--books are here to stay. Here are some of the reasons why:

Why we love books

1. Entertainment. Books are still one of the best and most accessible form of entertainment. By reading, we can learn about any subject and travel in our imaginations to any place and time, even to alternative universes. Moreover, reading is a very flexible endeavor. We can do it in the privacy of our homes, online by joining virtual reading clubs, or with our friends and acquaintances in local book clubs. This is why reading books appeals to practically every personality type. Introverts, extroverts and everyone in between can enjoy reading, be it as a solitary or as a social activity.

2. Socializing. Which brings me to my next point. Even when we read by ourselves, we engage, indirectly, in an inherently social act. By reading, we connect with the literary canon of the past or with what is considered popular at the moment. Chances are that if we’ve heard of a book, it’s already been heavily marketed and promoted. Some of us join local book clubs, which become a welcome opportunity of catching up on our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives, enjoying time together not just books. Moreover, via review websites such as Librarything.com and Goodreads.com, readers can make new online acquaintances based on lively discussions and common interests.

3. Acquiring information or knowledge. We often read to learn about art or world history; how to diet and exercise; what is fashionable to wear; even how to parent our children. Anything and everything can be found in books. Although nowadays there are many convenient online sources of information, good books tend to provide a level of depth and detail that cannot be matched by brief articles or descriptions. The information we gather from books, in turn, can help us enjoy life on a deeper level. Generally speaking, the more informed we are about a given subject, the more we can appreciate it in real life. To offer one example out of many, just think about how much more we enjoy tourism when we have the relevant background about the history, culture, art and architecture of the place(s) we visit.

4. Enhancing our imagination and leading innumerable parallel lives. Most of us assume that we only have one life to live on this Earth. As we grow older, our lives narrow as a result of the choices–of lifestyle, partners, careers, family–we make. Each choice, be it good or bad, determines our direction and eliminates other potential paths in life. Reading is the easiest way to explore countless modes of existence practically risk free. Books carry us to places we’ve not even dreamt of before: different epochs, countries, cultures, or styles of life. Literature is in some ways even more liberating than film because readers fill in the blanks more so than viewers by bringing to life in their minds characters and situations described only through black and white symbols, or words. This is why reading novels is never a passive exercise. Like fiction writing itself, it is an inherently philosophical and liberating exercise of our imaginations. By envisioning various thought experiments–different characters, times, places and situations–reading represents one of the most accessible, inexpensive and creative ways of escaping the limitations of our lives. Even a lifetime of world excursions could not match it, as we cannot travel across centuries and even millennia, or inhabit other planets, except in our imaginations. Reading novels gives us the ontological freedom, and the Epicurean pleasure, which arguably no other activity can afford. Moreover, enjoying literature--be it through reading or writing--is an inherently aesthetic pleasure that is compatible with making good life decisions, being empathic and other-regarding to those who deserve our empathy, and having strong ethical boundaries. In other words, the almost infinite aesthetic (imaginary) exploration across cultures, time and space afforded by literature can coexist with the freedom, which every moral human being exercises, of making ethical choices. For these reasons and more, I believe that no matter what technical and economic transformations the publishing world will undergo, we will continue to love books.

Despite the liberating pleasure that reading affords, the presentation of literary works is rarely focused on the enjoyment books can offer. Literary criticism tends to approach novels through the prism of various specialized scholarly interpretations, such as Marxist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, postcolonial, semiotic, or Lacanian (and other psychoanalytic) readings, or serves pragmatic educational purposes, such as teaching students the basics of passing AP Literature tests in the United States, or the baccalaureate exam in France and other European countries. While such academic and didactic presentations are useful and valuable for both students and scholars, they have less appeal to a broad audience who reads literature to simply relax and enjoy books.

Matthieu Binder’s French literature blog, Littératurefrançaise.net

I say all this because, as a lifelong scholar of French literature, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature specializing in the French Enlightenment and Romanticism, I rarely found an introduction to literary works that emphasizes first and foremost the pleasure of reading without sacrificing rigor or depth. About a year ago, however, I was fortunate enough to run across Matthieu Binder’s website, https://litteraturefrancaise.net/fr/accueil/, which is all about the joy of reading. Upon learning more about Matthieu’s background from his online bio, it occurred to me that his approach to literature was so different from those of most other literary scholars precisely because his educational formation was not, originally, in the field. Matthieu Binder pursued a science baccalaureate, followed by a Masters in Philosophy and a degree in Political Science from the University of Lyon. What brought him to French literature was not an academic degree or scholarly pursuits in the field, but the sheer love and pleasure of reading books, which he desired to share with as many readers as possible. This is precisely what his internationally popular blog, https://litteraturefrancaise.net/fr/accueil/, which he started in 2020, is all about. His website offers readers different ways of approaching French literature: 1. Chronologically, via a timeline that begins with Medieval literature and ends with modern, twentieth-century literature; 2. Biographically, by offering the most salient details about the lives of the featured authors; 3. Historically, by exploring the ways in which context impacted those authors and vice versa, and 4. Thematically, by presenting the most relevant subjects broached by the authors.

A wide-ranging presentation of the most influential French authors

Beginning with the late medieval era, when the French language (Old French) was consolidated in courtly literature over Latin, Matthieu begins his literary introduction with the works of novelist, essayist and poet Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) and of the populist poet François Villon (1431-1463). Moving on to the Renaissance, he covers the works of satirist François Rabelais (1483-1553), the poet and playwright Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), the poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) and the philosophical essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), one of his all-time favorites. The seventeenth-century sees the bloom of French authors, often revolving around the royal court and the cultural salons led by influential and learned women, such as Madame de Rambouillet. Matthieu introduces readers to the playwright Pierre Corneille (1606-1680), the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), the extraordinarily popular comic playwright Molière (1622-1673), the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the epistolary writer Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696), the innovative novelist Madame de La Fayette (1634-1693); the tragic playwright Jean Racine (1639-1699) and the moralist Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696). He then traces the rise of Enlightenment thought, republican ideals and secular culture in the wide-ranging, and quite literally encyclopedic writings (given they coauthored the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1751-1772) of the philosophes and salonnières. Here Matthieu explores the works of Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1713-1784). He also presents the plays of Beaumarchais (1732-1799) and the intriguing psychological fiction of Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803). In the nineteenth-century, he traces the rise of Realism and Romanticism, the main literary movements of the era, in the works of the novelists François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), Stendhal (1783-1842), Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). He goes on to present the works of the poet, critic and essayist Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the fiction of the stylistically punctilious and exquisite novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the novels of the path-breaking and prolific writer George Sand (1804-1864), the imaginative fiction of Jules Verne (1828-1905), the naturalist novels of the prolific writer and essayist Emile Zola (1840-1902), as well the short stories of Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Not neglecting poetry, he presents the Symbolist works of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Arthur Rimbaud (1850-1893) and the Surrealist poems of Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870). Matthieu then proceeds to introduce readers to the literary giants of the twentieth century, starting with the fin de siècle innovative writer of psychological fiction Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and including, among others, the founders of existentialism in literature and philosophy, Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), the philosophical writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), and the politically controversial novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His literary presentations are not, nor do they claim to be, all-inclusive, but they are extremely informative, engaging and entertaining, giving readers a taste for French literature and culture.

Stendhal and George Sand

In an illuminating 2024 interview with Dr. Heiner Wittman, Matthieu expounds upon his multifaceted approach to French literary history. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejvskY3hg4) One of the first questions he is asked by Dr. Wittman is if he has a favorite author or movement. Matthieu avows that one of that one of his favorites is Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), a versatile novelist associated with both Romanticism and Realism who also wrote insightful essays on music, art, life and love (De l’amour, 1822). When asked how his presentations differ from the norm in subject, Matthieu indicates that he attempts to offer a widely accessible yet fresh perspective that may be missed by others. He offers as an example his introduction to the prolific and trailblazing writer George Sand (Amantine Lucie Aurore Dupin de Francueil, 1804-1876). Matthieu indicates that he focuses on the ways in which Sand paved the way for other women writers and for feminism in general through novels that critiqued gender norms and the restrictions imposed on women, such as Indiana (1832) and Consuelo (1842), rather than discussing her more popular “romans champêtres”, such as François le Champi (1847) and La Petite Fadette (1849), for which she is principally known (and taught) today.

Victor Hugo

Matthieu also pays special attention to one of the founders of the Romantic movement and one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth-century in particular, Victor Hugo (1802-1885), to illustrate how fiction impacts history. His presentation of Hugo explores not just the novelist’s popular literary works, but also the permeable boundaries and powerful mutual influences among the arts. Needless to say, Victor Hugo was, above all, a literary giant. By the end of his life, the author was so popular that when he succumbed to pneumonia in June 1885 at the ripe age of 83, the French President Jules Grévy gave him a state memorial service. Over two million people joined the funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe all the way to the Pantheon. To put the legendary writer’s popularity in perspective, the population of Paris at the time was approximately 2,135,000 people. Matthieu emphasizes that Victor Hugo gained such well-deserved renown because his contributions to literature and literary debates not only transformed that field and brought about the birth of French Romanticism, but also had an immense impact upon other arts. His internationally popular novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831), reawakened popular interest in gothic architecture and in the Medieval period in general. After reading the novel, tourists started flocking to the ramshackle cathedral, and Parisians rallied for its renovation. For decades, ever since it was ravaged by angry mobs and many of its statues were systematically dismantled during the French Revolution, the Notre Dame cathedral had fallen into disrepair. Even Napoleon I, who had his famous coronation there on December 2, 1804, preferred to cover Notre Dame’s dilapidated walls with expensive tapestries, rather than invest in its costly renovation. It took Victor Hugo’s bestseller to attract crowds to the neglected but still glorious cathedral, which in turn prompted the talented architect Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), a great admirer of both the novel and of medieval architecture, to begin its reconstruction. In a labor of love that took him about twenty-five years to complete, LeDuc not only renovated the Notre Dame cathedral according to its original blueprints, but also added a second, purely ornamental spire, and replaced many of its decapitated sculptures with new, phantasmagoric gargoyles inspired by Hugo’s novel, thus harmoniously blending the old gothic style with the new Romanticism. In fact, the Romantic movement is one of Matthieu Binder’s passions and a focal point of his presentation of French literature.

When asked by Dr. Wittman, in the same interview, to describe Romanticism, Matthieu once again does not offer a conventional textbook reply. He depicts the Romantic movement in a nuanced manner, as having fluid boundaries that were crystalized only in retrospect by literary critics as well as proposed contemporaneously by the authors associated with it. He indicates that nineteenth century authors such as Victor Hugo rallied around the concept of Romanticism, already popular in Germany since Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), both in a polemical manner, to rebel against the restrictions imposed by Neoclassical rules, and for promotional purposes, to underscore their own importance and originality. Matthieu regards Romanticism more as "un nouveau souffle", or what we would call “a breath of fresh air”, rather than as a strictly defined, homogeneous literary movement. In fact, he shows that the concept of Romanticism was so permeable that it readily translated to other fields, revolutionizing the domains of philosophy, literature, art, architecture and music.

Matthieu’s elaborations of literary movements in context, as breathing, living exchanges of literary styles, themes and tropes, innovations and ideas proposed, which are debated and transformed by given authors, not only engages readers far more than rigid definitions, but also is in line with the best and most sophisticated scholarly accounts of literary movements. To offer an example, once again, from my own field of specialization, Matthieu’s characterization of Romanticism as “un nouveau souffle” conforms to the rigorous scholarly elaboration offered by M. H. Abrams, one of the most prestigious literary scholars of Romanticism, as well as to the innovative reading of Romantic emotion offered by noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

How Matthieu’s introduction to Romanticism aligns with the top scholarship on the subject

a) M. H. Abrams’s discussion of Romanticism in The Mirror and the Lamp

In The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953), which remains a classic in the study of Romanticism, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between a theory and an orientation. A theory begins with a set of assumptions that lead to a conclusion that follows logically from them. Romanticism lacks the internal consistency and rational structure of a theory. Nonetheless, the writing of the Romantics points to related ways of conveying human emotion. As Abrams explains referring to Wordsworth in particular, for the Romantics, “A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings” (22).

Clearly, Romanticism is not the expression of raw, subconscious impulses, as the Surrealists would later describe the automatism of their own art. If Abrams states that expressive Romantic theories comprise an orientation, it’s because they present different ways of processing emotions thoughtfully for artistic ends. As literary critics point out, the role of emotions differs vastly from author to author. Romantic texts engage intellectual history, leading us to wonder: Is emotion visceral and uncontrollable, as so many thinkers, from Plato to Kant, had maintained? Is it related in some fundamental way to what we know about the world, as the Stoics postulated? Is it tied to our ethical beliefs and tendencies, as Hume and Rousseau claimed in their partial defenses of sympathy? Is it induced by art, as Wordsworth and Baudelaire would declare? The difference in assumptions about emotion and its role in artistic creation contributes to the richness and versatility of Romantic literature and of the expressive models of art that underpin it. Romantic literature links emotion to art in ways that engage the big questions of almost every field of what we now call the humanities and social sciences, relating art to psychology, political theory and nearly every branch of philosophy.

b) Martha Nussbaum’s presentation of Romantic emotion in Upheavals of Thought

Given the diversity and wide-ranging intellectual implications of Romanticism, it’s difficult to limit it even to the boundaries of an orientation. Yet the question remains unavoidable, so let’s return to it: in what ways can we speak meaningfully of a Romantic orientation? Like Abrams, I believe that there is one, indeed. I think we’re in a better position to understand Romanticism by looking at its philosophical underpinnings and seeing how radically it has transformed the way we look at emotion in general and at passion in particular. For Romanticism was the most significant movement in Western culture to render passion and its artistic expression not an object of fear or ambivalence, but a highly desirable quality; one which is indispensable to human happiness. In Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Martha Nussbaum traces the most prominent philosophical arguments for and against emotion. The con side tends to win over the pro side. Nussbaum shows that even those philosophers who were generally sympathetic to the emotions—including Aristotle, the Stoics, Smith and Rousseau—warned against their uncontrollable nature and the danger they posed to reason (in the pursuit of knowledge) and to ethics (in the pursuit of the good life). Rousseau and Hume make some apologies for emotion in their study of sympathy, but even they exercise caution and qualify extensively.

Nussbaum considers in particular the Kantian argument against the emotions, which was very influential during the Enlightenment and which the Romantics had to contend with. Kant argues that emotions are too subjective, unreliable and volatile to provide an adequate basis for moral conduct. To address this objection, Nussbaum breaks it down into its component parts. First, such an argument tells us that emotions can be dangerous because they focus upon the individual and his or her personal goals or projects rather than the good of humanity. Second, the argument goes, emotions are associated with extremely close and intense attachments that may be “too partial or unbalanced” to lead to ethical decisions. (12) Third, it’s objected that even those emotions that we consider positive—such as love or compassion—are often inseparable from destructive emotions, such as jealousy, anger and hatred. Although Kant stated this argument most compellingly, many philosophers that Nussbaum examines in her book--including Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Descartes, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant himself –attempt to prove in one way or another that emotions are uncontrollable and destructive impulses (much of the same order as our bodily drives) that are unreliable motivations for morality. (13)

To detach emotion from the ethical standards and rationalist assumptions that were so inhospitable to it, Romantic authors first aestheticized it. Emotion, they illustrate, is above all related to the way we create and appreciate art. It’s not, as philosophers tended to argue, primarily related to how we regulate ourselves or respond ethically to other human beings. Most Romantics did not go so far as to say that art could never be judged by moral criteria. Even when the late-Romantic theory of art for art’s sake become all the rage in France in the 1830’s, art was still not regarded as immune to moral judgment. Nonetheless, the Romantics made it possible for us to see emotion as tied to creativity and meaning in a way that rendered moral responses secondary to aesthetic ones. Once they made this important shift in the link between art and ethical value, the Romantics could reconnect emotion to all other important human faculties (cognition, perception and rational thought) in new, refreshing and complex ways. Under their pens, emotion—and passion in particular--became the center of human existence, its most exalted state and a conduit to beauty and meaning.

Given my background in Romanticism, I have discussed here how Matthieu’s accessible and entertaining introduction to the “breath of fresh air” that the Romantic movement brought to literature, philosophy and the arts fits well with some of the most influential and rigorous scholarly discussions of the subject. However, as mentioned, Matthieu’s literary discussions span entire centuries and cover dozens of great writers, introducing readers to all of French literature, from Medieval times to modern days, with the same depth and in the same engaging manner as he presented the authors associated with Romanticism. Matthieu Binder’s popular literary blog Littératurefrançaise.net demonstrates that deeper knowledge of a field only enhances our pleasure and reminds us why our favorite relaxation, escape and pastime may still be, now and for a long time to come, reading (French) books.