Literature Essay 1

What is literature? Maybe it’s just a novel on the New York Times best seller list. Maybe it’s an old book you find on grandma’s shelf in the attic. Maybe it’s a collection of stories with fictitious characters and made-up lands which were created to give us something to do on rainy days. Perhaps it is the stories of lives lived by real people in real times and places, meant to show us what happened hundreds of years ago. Or, perhaps literature is more than words on a page. I’ve read my fair share of books in middle and high school and seen multiple genres on multiple levels of grammatical creativity that I’ve both liked and disliked. I like reading a good book just as much as the next guy. But is literature based solely in books and novels alone, or does it go deeper than that? Perhaps, just perhaps, literature has more to offer than just another Tom Clancy series best seller. If one is to study it, they must study it in its’ entirety to fully understand it. It’s time to open your minds, people, class is in session.
First off, literature should be defined to better understand what we are getting into. Literature (noun), pronounced [lit-er-uh-cher, -choo r, li-truh-], as described on dictionary.com, is “writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic or essential features, as poetry, novels, history, biography, and essays.” Another definition describes it as “the body of artistic writings of a country or period that are characterized by beauty of expression and form and by universality of intellectual and emotional appeal”, or more simply put, “artistic writings worthy of being remembered.” So, literature is basically anything artistically or emotionally motivated in print. So, yes, books are definitely included in this definition. So, why learn about literature?
What’s so important about literature? For starters, it tells us about ourselves and each other. We can learn a lot about a person from the way they act, but you can learn a lot more about them personally just by reading their writing. People usually pour their heart and soul into what they love doing so, when you read a book or poem you’re getting a taste of their heart and soul. It also allows us the possibility of immersing ourselves in a world of our own creation, a realm or reality formed in our imagination by the words written upon the pages we read. In other words, reading is like watching a movie inside your head. It’s really fun and it’s more than just a good way to pass the time on a rainy day. There’s also a variety to literature, it’s more than just books. As its definition suggests, literature is made up of a “artistic writings”, like poetry.
Poetry, in and of itself is a very artistic and almost always emotional in the way it is written. It can tell a story in many different ways, through rhyme or another sort of verse structure. It can be found all over the world in many different cultures, both ancient and still fairly young. Some nations have birthed their own artistic verse structures to which they have held somewhat traditionally, if not religiously. A prime example of such traditional structuring is that of the Japanese haiku. It is a strictly simple poetic structure, made up of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables, in that order. Haiku can be about just about anything, something like love or something as simple as another day at the office. Anything is game. Poets usually write about something they feel passionately about, putting their very heart and soul into each sentence or verse to show how they feel. Poetry is also a popular way of creating vivid mental pictures in the mind of the read through the use of creative grammar and well placed metaphors and similes. Books, themselves, can be poetic in the way they make the story come alive to the reader or in the messages they hold within the pages. If literature is, indeed, an art, then I would venture a guess to say that poetry is, perhaps, one of its more beautiful forms.
But wait, there’s more! Books and poems are definitely not the only pieces of literature out there, you know. You like watching movies and television shows, don’t you? You know, the kind they play on the boob tube all day, making money for every couch potato that turns it on and watches one of their shows? The shows themselves are not really literature as we would normally think of literature, but the scripts and screen plays from which they are created and directed are. It is a form of writing, much like the scripts of plays and musicals from which they originated and that still continue to exist to this day in schools, small time theaters and, ultimately, on Broadway. Whatever it’s being used for, the script and or story board on which the actors and animators base their actions, lines and animations on is all in a descriptive writing that doesn’t just tell them what to do, but tells a story. It is a story the cast and crew help recreate on a visual scale to be viewed and enjoyed upon the stage, the big screen and, ultimately, the television set. It’s a kind of interactive literature of sorts.
So, now that we know that literature is more than just old dusty books at the library that only high school teachers and old college professors read, a new question arises: how the heck are we suppose to study it?! Is there one way to study literature as a whole? Well, you can’t really go wrong with reading the material and then discussing it afterward. That has been my general experience in English class in my early high school years and I thought it worked rather well in helping me understand what I was reading. Something I found about myself is that if I don’t understand something, I ask questions. Discussing the reading allows those questions to be answered and perhaps gain insights from my instructor and fellow classmates as well. Without discussion of the reading, the questions may go unanswered. When that happens, I may get frustrated and move on to something else and lose interest in what I’m reading.
Sometimes reading aloud a book or some other bit of literature in class can be a good way to learn about it because it gives you a chance to figure out the way it actually sounds, they way it’s meant to be read. It’s interactive and surprisingly fun if you do it right. It helps you connect with the heart and soul of the author in a vague sense. It also helps with pinpointing and remembering the main points of the reading and ultimately makes reading the material more fun to learn. If nothing, the way literature is taught should be fun and interesting, or at least amusing if nothing else. The more fun a student has while involved in the class, the more interested they’ll be and, therefore, the more they will likely learn from it.