Literature

“Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?” The question, posed by the famed literary scholar Harold Bloom at the beginning of How to Read and Why (2001, 19), may be read as a humanistic rebuke to the social scientific orientation of much of the modern academy. Bloom's answer to his question, as applicable in leadership studies as elsewhere, is that wisdom is found in literature, and especially in great literature—enduring works of drama, fiction, and poetry, both ancient and modern. Reading literature, Bloom says, “returns you to otherness” (2001, 19) to connections with others' lives and feelings. Oliver Williams, a scholar of religion and business ethics, argues more directly that literature can stimulate ethical reflection: “stories that ‘ring true’ bring us in touch with the fullness of our humanity” (1997, 7). Such a view may be traced back to Aristotle, who argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that the best education should not only impart information but also develop our capacity to feel and sympathize, for “to feel delight and pain rightly or wrongly has no small effect on our actions” (1962, Book 2, Chapter 2, 1104b, 1105a). The writer Salman Rushdie puts the case for why literature matters even more grandly: “Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart” (1989, 11).

“The truth of the tale,” as Rushdie calls it, holds a somewhat paradoxical place in the interdisciplinary field of leadership studies. Only a handful of programs—chief among them Richmond University's Jepson School of Leadership, Claremont McKenna College's Leadership Studies Program, and Duke University's Hart Leadership Program—build the study of literature into their curriculums. (Alburty in “A Cast of Leaders” [1999] provides a vivid glimpse of Duke's course in Leadership and the Arts, which takes a group of undergraduates to New York for a semester of theater, art, and leadership studies.) At the level of individual leadership courses, a few schools, like Kentucky Wesleyan University, Birmingham-Southern University, and Rice University, offer a class or two that draws heavily on literature. (History and ethics are much more common elements of what might be thought of as “leadership humanities.”) But while literature only infrequently makes it into the leadership curriculum, a remarkable number of academics labor to explore literature for leadership lessons, and there are numerous studies of literary works published in the field.