Philip Pullman asks, can literature change the world?
Voluntary Service
By Philip Pullman
The Guardian, Saturday December 28 2002
What is the relationship between art and society? Can art do anything to make the world better, or is it quite useless? This is an old puzzle, and no one has solved it yet. At one end of the range of possible answers lies the Soviet idea that the writer is the engineer of human souls, that art has a social function and should produce what the state needs, and at the other end is the declaration of Oscar Wilde, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; books are well written or badly written, that is all. However, he wasn’t consistent about this: elsewhere, in “The Critic as Artist”, he wrote “All art is immoral”; and it’s notable that The Picture of Dorian Gray itself is one of the most firmly moral stories ever written.
(Read the article here, at The Guardian online)
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