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I'm Arnold Weinstein.I teach comparative literature at BrownUniversity.I've been here almost as long as thisuniversity has.I want to start in introducing thiscourse with the essential question thathas got to be on your minds, just likeit's on the minds of my students, whichis, What will you get out of this course?It's a question that underwrites allselective education- after all, if you arerequired to take this course, makes nodifference, that question, you have totake it.But, of course, that's not true foranybody who is listening to me now.After some four and a half decades ofteaching, I find it harder and harder togive a good answer to that question, whatyou will get out of it.So, let, let me start with the negative,what you're not going to get out of it,

what this course is not.It won't get you a job.I don't think that's a big surprise foranybody, but it won't get you a job.And I think in the frame work of Courseraand the kinds of courses that we find sooften in its platforms, this is a verysignificant kind of claim I'm making,that it won't get you a job, because manyof the offerings understandably, rightly,wonderfully in the Coursera program,will, in fact, give you a kind ofmaterial, intellectual, perhaps

professional benefit,that you may learn key issues in areas asdiverse as math or science, business,sociology, you may learn skills incomputer programming.This won't be the case for The Fiction ofRelationship.Secondly, it won't even give you the kindof ostensible literary coverage that youmight expect to be able to get in otherliterature offerings under the Courseraumbrella, which is to say one couldimagine a course on modern poetry, one

could imagine a course on surrealism,Elizabethan drama, Latin poetry, themodern novel, et cetera.Yet, this course, along those kinds ofthick lines of, say, accreditation is nota good bet.So that's the bad news.So let's look a little more closely atwhat this means, and why it shouldmatter, which is really a question of

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asking, What, in any event, is aliterature course good for?We know today in the United States,there is an increasingly strident call formore education in the areas of math andscience.We know pertinently, I know itpertinently, that students at BrownUniversity who major in engineering orcomputer sciences, are very likely tograduate with an immediate job awaitingthem, and a good salary too.So we know that our society needsdoctors, and it need technicians, and itneeds scientists, probably needs businesspeople and economists too.When's the last time that you ever hearda politician say we need more literature?We need more people in this society tomajor in philosophy, in art, in music.I actually think we do need that, but Idon't think that I have heard, or amlikely to hear one of our politiciansmake that claim.

And that tells us something about therather sad, distressing state of theliberal arts educational model today.Young people come to elite universitieslike the that one I teach at and exit oftenwith six-figure debts because of the costof going here,and if they are humanities majors, theyare often hard put to find a job in atough economy.It's senseless to deny all of that.So the crisis of the liberal arts has todo with the kind of pragmatic claims that

we understandably, rightly make abouteducation, particularly costly education.I think the crisis of the humanities is arich, interesting crisis.The question about what it's good for isa question that is never easily answered.It's what I'm going to struggle with inthis intro lecture before getting down tobrass tacks about this particular course.Let me make an obvious distinctionbetween the students enrolled at theelite universities paying these dizzyingtuitions, and the genius of the Coursera

model, which is, to take this course, allyou really need is a modem.And, therefore, in a sense, we are freeto simply take the pragmatic question andturn it on its head.You, the people who are watching me orlistening to me now, are free in a waythat students at private universities maynot be free.To think about what reading literature,

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studying humanities might actually mean.You're not paying for this in the sameway.You might get something different fromit.You have a kind of maneuvering room-I'm talking about conceptual maneuveringroomthat many students, who would appear tobe very privileged, don't have.Hence the question is, Does a course likethis within the Coursera operationactually open doors for you, turn onlights for you, that have little to do withcareer or particular skill sets?Is it possible we have definedusefulness, sort of pragmatism, toonarrowly?Too materially?What, after all, is education supposed toprepare us for?One thing that stands in my mind, as asomewhat old person now, is that there isa colossal difference between whatever

job or profession you have and the lifethat you have.Even for those who work the hardest,there will be hours in their day, intheir nights, in their lives, where theyare free to think and wonder about issuesthat are not profession-oriented.What does life mean?How do we go through it?What challenges come our way?These are things that have little to dowith career as such.And so, the question that I want to deal

with is, What does reading offer us,reading books, reading literature?How germane might it be, in the societythat we live in today, which is such adigitalized, technological wonder,where people are looking at screens andmonitors and working with iPads andthings like that?I have no clue who you are.I have to think that many of you who areconsidering this course are here becauseof the title of this course, The Fictionof Relationship.

Because relationship has got to be realin your life, so why on Earth would Icall it a fiction, and what does the word"fiction" mean?And do you think of the term fiction as apositive or as a negative?What does it imply for you?Is it possible that your ownrelationships are fictional?That doesn't mean unreal, doesn't mean

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false, doesn't mean erroneous.It means that they are constructs in yourown life.That's obviously the central pun of thiscourse, is that we are reading fiction,that is to say novels, aboutrelationships, but we're also consideringthe notion that a relationship itself isa fiction.It can be a meaningful fiction; it couldbe a worthless fiction.It seems to me it's an issue peoplegrapple with all the time in theirlives.After all, relationship, if I takechemical A and add it to chemical B in alaboratory, I can probably measure whatit produces, what it is.But if I take person A, and introduceperson A to person B, and they tend toeither to live together, or to sleeptogether, or to care about each other, orthink about each other, or feel thingsregarding each other, what metric do we

have for that?What kind of measure can we possibly takefor that?So those are the kinds of issues, itseems to me, that literature illuminates.That strikes me as invaluable.Because I don't know where else we'resupposed to go to learn to think moredeeply, perhaps more rewardingly, perhapsmore disturbingly, about this spate ofissues, and those are the things that I'mgoing to want to talk about in thisintroductory lecture.