ABSTRACT
Literature is training in doing without oneself. This chapter presents a white paper on literature, first issued by the Shelley Jackson Vocational School (SJVS) in 1963, revised and expanded in 1996, and updated in 2013, as follows: The SJVS considers literature a form of amateur necromancy. The SJVS considers that to answer this call is our vocation as human beings. Literature offers a bespoke haunting to those already thronged with ghosts, and a guided tour from the ambiguous safety of an armchair of that land in which all are native, but none feel at home. The necrophysicists of the SJVS have produced their own cosmology to account for this conjunction. The SJVS is not concerned with good writing, since what is good has foreclosed the possibility of exceeding all measures. The stutter of a shy child may become the elective stutter that is writing.
