"Does Great Literature Make Us Better?"

Here is the link to Gregory Currie's article, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" What do you make of this article? What kind of conclusions (if any) does Currie come to? How does this article speak to Annie Murphy Paul's article "Your Brain on Fiction" ?

If you have time, it is very interesting to read the comments at the end of articles in The New York Times--sometimes they are as insightful as (or more insightful than) the article itself.  Here are a few comments I really enjoyed:

"I'm twenty- one years of age, and major in literature at university. I liken the questions Professor Currie poses to the course assessments handed to students at the conclusion of each semester. I dread these handouts, and like my peers, seldom take them seriously. Pencil in hand, I struggle to fit the breadth and nuance of the semester into the tidy, bureaucratic grading bubbles:
'On a scale of 1 to 10, how much have you learned in this course?'

I hesitate to answer these questions, because they seem so contrary to the ideas at the heart of literary discourse. In the classroom we are taught to do “re” work—rethink, reconsider, reweigh, retrace—essentially, go back to the beginning and start all over again. Do I think any differently about temptations of the flesh now that I have read Faust? Probably not. Am I more equipped to resist material pleasures in my own life? No. I am as confused and conflicted as ever before.
'So, did you learn anything at all then this semester?' my father will ask confusedly, as I eagerly summarzie the semester.

If he had given me a bubble sheet, quite frankly, I would have answered “no.” Because that bubble sheet’s conception of learning, as measured by numbers, statistics—quantitative, inert objective tools of measurement—cannot adequately capture the visceral, pulsating, exhilarating feeling of being alive, as great writers so oft capture."

And another great one:

"This is a fascinating question, and I'm glad that it's getting consideration in the Times. But you're asking one question here and answering another. You ask "Does reading (generally) make us better people?" and then answer "Does reading create more empathy by acquainting us with situations we haven't experienced?" Of course, reading (generally) does make us better people even if it's only to give us a language to talk about things we hadn't known about before. But literature itself has been working on the latter question for hundreds of years. I understand this is a philosophy column, but I immediately don't expect to hear very new and interesting things from someone who is talking about a field outside of his own. Martha Nussbaum's "Love's Knowledge" is hardly the exemplar of this particular inquiry, considering that it's out of date, is more about Nussbaum's frustrations with the limits of her own field, and a discussion of how much she loves books rather than their ethical merits. It's hardly an example of a rigorous literary study. It might be influential, but it's cited more often as something to argue against rather than as support for a new argument. Other ethical criticism (Booth, George Levine, Altieri, Hale, J. Hillis Miller, etc.) would be much better places to start. Better to think about literature on its own terms (rather than psychology's), especially when you're asking a question that novels themselves still haven't worked out. "