So, now it’s your turn to write an essay on this topic. Hope you didn’t think you would escape it. No Literature professor, if they do value their work, would free their students from the necessity to express personal opinions on this issue.
Such writing assignment is included into your course program not because the college administration want to make sure Literature is still worth teaching. (Alright, partly that may be a reason as well.) Rather they want to make sure you realize that literature will always be an integral part of human life, even though you personally may not accept this idea.
You’ve probably already guessed that in this post you’ll find bright arguments for studying Literature at college and for being a book fan in general. I’ll be really glad to know that they coincide with your own position on the issue and hence can help you support your opinions on how essential literature is for all of us in the essay.
By the way, if you need any help with writing an argumentative or persuasive essay, go here and learn more about our services: orderessay.org/persuasiveessay.
However, if you believe that literature can bring you hardly any practical benefit, I’m not going to convince you that it’s quite a narrow-minded approach to answering the given question. You can check out the ideas below and see for yourself. In any case, the very topic implies that you do agree that people need literature. It just asks you why they need it.
Studying Literature Improves Your Writing and Speaking Skills
You work with dozens and even hundreds of texts (just imagine how many literary works you’ll be required to read in four years of study and sum them all up). You see how the greatest authors of all times combine words in order to build sentences, which are destined to amaze the whole world until the end of its time. And once you find yourself trying to imitate your favorites’ styles in your own writings and speeches.
Your brain stores the collection of original metaphors, apt comparisons, witty idioms, and distinctive characters. They help you come up with great examples for your college essays and train your eloquence.
Besides, the more you read, the better you feel a language. It means that you can always choose the right word to say what you want, you make no spelling or punctuation mistakes, you just write intelligently and impressively. Looks like that’s right what you need both at college and outside it.
Literature Develops Your Analytical and Critical Thinking Skills
Have you already thought of all those book reviews you were once assigned? Have you already remembered how your professor asks your group to analyze a very weird story? (And the problem itself isn’t in the story. It’s in the analysis – you have hardly any idea of how to do it.)
By the literary analysis most professors usually mean an exhaustive interpretation of the main theme and idea of the story, its characters’ qualities and deeds, as well as of the lesson it can teach readers.
Why on earth do you need it all? How on earth can it all help you solve real-life challenges?
I understand these two are the very first questions you ask yourself when you get an assignment to write a review of a literary work and before you put up with your fate, opening the browser and starting to google for some info.
But the thing is that such assignment actually requires you to analyze an absolutely real-life issue. Deciphering author’s meanings leads you to comprehension of intentions, actions, meanings that can and do occur out there, in the big world of ours.
Below we’ll discuss the relatedness of literature to our current reality in more detail. For now, let’s agree on the fact that digging deep into the motives of characters or turns of a plot trains your ability to make the right conclusions of people’s behavior or twists of information in your everyday life.
Quality Literature Expands Your Worldview
Such a statement might provoke some skepticism among people who have free access to info on literally everything at any time of the day and night. You can read about different philosophies, histories, cultures, beliefs whenever you want. But these are just definitions and facts. And they are really good for your research papers. But they are still too tasteless for your mind and soul.
Whether you like it or not, you’re a human being. You need emotions and impressions. They add special flavor to your understanding of the world and people who live in it. This is what literature can give you. And this is why you need it.
Writers and poets can bind very different, exotic and strange, even opposite destinies, symbols, images so masterfully, that these combinations easily ruin the hardest walls inside your mind, which man-made bias and stereotypes might have erected in it. The strong fresh flows of revolutionary ideas, straightforward opinions, beautiful analogies can turn your worldview upside down and change your way of thinking forever.
Good literature knows no discrimination. It’s a hymn each nation sings to itself and to other cultures.
Books Take You to the Past and Even to the Future
Of course, you can read about World War II in Wikipedia instead of Remarque’s novels. The Wikipedia article is full of names and dates, detailed descriptions of almost all events and analyses of both the reasons and results. How can it even be compared with a dramatized story in a novel?
But do you know what such author as Remarque does to create an immortal masterpiece of literature? They focus on personalities and destinies rather than on chronological facts and numbers. It may even seem that they take a magnifying glass and try to scrutinize the tiniest details of people’s lives at the time of a war or revolution, economic instability or social decline, cultural regeneration or scientific progress.
So, when you’re reading a story from the past, you can vividly imagine the whole picture and take one more, alternative look at some historical events.
What about the future then? You probably know that Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1949. The great author made a bold effort to describe the life of the society after some 30-40 years. Fortunately, his literary predictions hadn’t come true. But what he wrote about then is still topical nowadays, after almost 70 years! That makes us all think where we’re going, what waits for us and whether we need to change it.
You can find out more interesting opinions on George Orwell’s book here.
Still, Literature Is Also the Mirror of Our Present Life
You’ve certainly come across this metaphor. If we put aside classic novels and anti-utopias about our rather not bright future, we’ll see an incredibly large amount of what is called modern literature.
It’s about us. It’s for us. It helps us look at ourselves and see what’s right and wrong about the way we live. However, the most specific feature of present-day literature is that it doesn’t make a clear distinction between good and bad. Everything seems mixed up. And each of us should decide for themselves which one of multiple and not just two opposite sides they will take.
Contemporary authors devote their works to things that worry, interest, scare, or inspire every fellow traveler on a bus to a town center and every visitor of a local pub. So, when you feel you lack understanding of what’s happening around you, books can tell you more than news.
Writers and poets are great psychologists and disinterested narrators. In stories they create you can find answers to some of your most painful questions.
Books Contain a Good Remedy from That Heaviness in the Left Part of Your Chest
So, we’ve smoothly approached this idea. No doubt, literature is the common property of humanity. But at the same time, it can be a very personal discovery, which influences on you in a very special way.
A character’s story in some novel can be similar to yours. Emotions and experiences of the hero can remind you of your own worries or joys. Reading about the problems this hero faces and tries to resolve makes you feel that your fears, pains and failures aren’t so terrifyingly unique of their kind and can be overcome.
Literature helps you escape from the reality, mysteriously enabling you to still see and analyze it through a true but romanticized or fully invented story. That’s right what we all need, isn’t it?
Consequently, we all need literature.