NAPIPINE SECUNDARY SCHOOL

WORK OF INGLESH

TOPIC: IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE IN SOCIETY

NAMBERS OF GROUP

Nampula
2022

THE IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE IN SOCIETY

The emergence of books once revolutionized the teaching process, allowing people to transfer
knowledge indirectly, making it more accessible. People can develop new skills independently of
others or learn more about the world by merely reading the material on a topic. Written history
invites a reader to imagine life before their existence, and allows discovering a whole new
culture without directly interacting with its bearers. However, literature does not merely store
dehumanized knowledge, pages of books consist of as much personal data as objective facts.
Famous Irish novelist C. S. Lewis once said that “literature adds to reality, it does not simply
describe it.” Via books, people can establish relationships with others, become more empathetic
and compassionate to each other. Therefore, literature is not only a tool for knowledge
acquisition but also communication between cultures and generations. Books do not exist simply
to educate the next generations, they have the power to incite emotions, change one’s views, and
find a purpose in life.

Literature allows a person to step back in time and learn about life on Earth from the ones who
walked before us. We can gather a better understanding of culture and have a greater
appreciation of them. We learn through the ways history is recorded, in the forms of manuscripts
and through speech itself.

Literature within history

History is not only a gateway to the past, it’s also suggestive of our present and the future.
Within every time period lies different people and within them, different stages in our ever-
growing culture. Each individual before was a product of their own time. As a species we evolve
every day and without that timestamp that literature gives us, we would know nothing about the
past.

Literature allows a person to step back in time and learn about life on Earth from the ones who
walked before us. We can gather a better understanding of culture and have a greater
appreciation of them. We learn through the ways history is recorded, in the forms of manuscripts
and through speech itself.

In periods from ancient Egypt, we can gather their history through hieroglyphics and paintings.
The symbols Egyptians left behind are what we now use to understand their culture. This is
different to Greek and Roman culture, which is found with greater ease, because of their innate
desire for accuracy in their writing.

This is the power that words have. They have the ability to spark a meaning, reform a nation and
create movements while being completely eternal. Inevitably, they will outlive their speaker.

The impact of literature

The impact of literature in modern society is undeniable. Literature acts as a form of expression
for each individual author. Some books mirror society and allow us to better understand the
world we live in.

Authors like F.Scott Fitzgerald are prime examples of this as his novel The Great Gatsby was a
reflection of his experiences and opinions of America during the 1920s.

We are easily connected to the psyche of authors through their stories. However, literature also
reiterates the need to understand modern day issues like human conflict.

A Gulf News article says, “In an era of modern media, such as television and movies, people are
misled into thinking that every question or problem has its quick corrections or solutions.
However, literature confirms the real complexity of human conflict”.

Literature is a reflection of humanity and a way for us to understand each other. By listening to
the voice of another person we can begin to figure out how that individual thinks. I believe that
literature is important because of its purpose and in a society, which is becoming increasing
detached from human interaction, novels create a conversation.

Literature does not only serve as a reliable and accessible way to conduct knowledge, but also as
a means to express oneself, or even self-reflect.

The scope of literature

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words—even when
organized and written down—is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily
informative—technical, scholarly, journalistic—would be excluded from the rank of literature by
most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as
belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if
they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit
is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the
contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at
all.

The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes
elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most theories of literary criticism base
themselves on an analysis of poetry, because the aesthetic problems of literature are there
presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all
but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world’s great novels—are literature, but there are
thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the
Chinese, possessors of one of the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with
few exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever).

The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. All
of the world’s classic surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art of literature, but
most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in
mind, though they may possess it, as it were, by accident.

The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature: its subject matter was of
comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository, informative
journalism, although there are still essayists in the great tradition who think of themselves as
artists. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the
arts.

Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters) rank among the
world’s greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with
posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are
in a highly polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their
standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope.

Many works of philosophy are classed as literature. The Dialogues of Plato (4th century BC) are
written with great narrative skill and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek
in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are classed as literature, while the speculations of
other philosophers, ancient and modern, are not. Certain scientific works endure as literature
long after their scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of
natural history, where the element of personal observation is of special importance. An excellent
example is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789).

Oratory, the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of the
American Indian, for instance, is famous, while in Classical Greece, Polymnia was the muse
sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome’s great orator Cicero was to have a decisive influence on the
development of English prose style. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is known to every
American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an
art. Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction, or cinema
and television scripts as accepted forms of literary expression, although others would hotly
dispute their exclusion. The test in individual cases would seem to be one of enduring
satisfaction and, of course, truth. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize
literature, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Man is subject to a continuous flood
of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there—in high-level journalism, in
television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and detective stories, and in plain,
expository prose—some writing, almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth
and relevance that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.