{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03380454824830977, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0006146281499692685, 'mean_word_length': 4.835125448028674, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Conditional Goods and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: How Literature (as a Whole) Could Matter Again

We literary scholars have a notorious flair for the dramatic, and I suspect that for many, the first impulse when confronted with the question “does literature matter?” is to say something like “of course it matters, and anyone who doesn’t see that is a heartless brute,” or—a more probable response these days—“of course it doesn’t matter, and anyone who doesn’t see that is blinded by the shimmering allure of cultural capital.” But things, in reality, are never that simple. It’s not just that the word “literature” has carried a variety of meanings over the years. It’s not even just that literary texts affect different people in different ways (sometimes indeed the same person in different ways at separate points in her life). It’s that they tend, very often, not to matter on their own. In order to matter, plays and poems and stories need a little help from us; they are therefore neither automatically futile (as the cultural-capital brigade would have us believe) nor automatically beneficial (as the moral-improvement brigade would have us believe), but instead something whose importance depends in part on our involvement, something we can assist in mattering. They are also something we will fail to assist in mattering, as long as we remain stuck in our cynical and wishful pieties. While the wishful pieties have alienated potential readers, the cynical ones have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies; against that background, we have a lot of work to do if literature as a whole is one day to matter again. 1