“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”
― Maya Angelou
Literature has been an important part of our lives since centuries and has prevailed an important part expressing, discovering and emphasizing the emotions and thoughts human beings possess.
We want students to love books. We also want them to turn out good citizens who practice in the streets and at the office what they identify as moral and good in class, people who do not cheat, manipulate, abuse, and unfairly judge others. English degree, it seems, is in a unique position to impose some degree of emotional and moral rigor on the curriculum.
After all, one only has to live on a violent, beleaguered planet and watch the news to know we are troubled. And one may only have to read fiction to understand that solutions can spring as readily from love and empathy as logic. If one recognizes that literature helps people understand one another, and can improve our individual and collective health.
We have always been notified by our actions about how we feel, expressing them by the use of our emotions and literature has been entailing us about who we are, what we do and what are we making out of ourselves. The truth and the lies, the good and the bad, the heart and the mind, the society and the soul, literature talks and hampers it all.
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Because Almighty Pen Is Powerful Than A Sword
The moment you enter the class it’s more like a session of the events and answers to many or all of the questions you have been asking yourself. A literature class makes it easy for you to get and understand everything profoundly, giving a path to your thoughts and prepares you to fight off for what is wrong and what is right.
The struggles seem more relatable, right?
Let’s Presumably Take A Journey of One Literature Class
Reading literature is a pleasurable, entertaining activity that offers readers the potential to escape from the troubles of daily life. Literature provides vicarious experiences that directly influence readers’ lives. Literature also helps readers build up a much wider range of knowledge, creating interest in new subjects and experiences.
Above all else, literature survives because of its capacity to entertain readers. Literature also has the power to provoke thought in readers, making it a leisure activity that is also intellectually productive, for it has the power to impart a wide variety of experiences to readers. A story can expose readers to different places, times, viewpoints and cultures, new ideas and new ways of looking at the world.
Literature’s ability to capture the imagination and depict the lives of others also increases readers’ ability to empathize with others. A study published in the journal Science found that readers of literary fiction demonstrated an increased ability to infer other people’s thoughts and emotions.
Finally, literature helps develop critical-thinking skills. Readings and discussions of literature force readers to make reasoned judgments about character motivations, cause and effect, critical analysis of plot and more.
One gains a greater understanding of different races, cultures, social classes or genders through reading stories about them. This increased range of experience in English class actually helps students better empathize with other individuals in life.
Because Life Is Not A PG Feel-Good Movie
Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen, widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and again.
“Literature and classes adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect. It irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” – C.S. Lewis
The one advice from the literature class, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess inside and outside the class.
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