Tuesday, October 13, 2009
What is Literature?
Literature in the plainest sense is of course the art of written works, on a much deeper level however literature to me is how those written works make you feel. Any piece of writing has the ability to make you empathise with the author or characters, make you think or feel differently than you did before, but what makes good literature is when you can read something and really feel the affect and influence of it, when it changes the way you live and see the world. The greats such as Shakespeare or Dickens of course embody literature, in the sense that behind the dated dialogue and long winded narrative there is always a message that rings true, it is this which makes me appreciate such works as good literature when there is a strong ideology behind everything on the surface.
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Is feeling separate from the ideology? Can a text score on one of these or does it have to be both? I agree, it's the way a book can change you that makes it good. Does it have to have proper plot for this to happen?
ReplyDeleteI would say so, yes. Ideology is what inspires the feeling and it is this which is fundamentally important in order for the reader to get that feeling and appreciation from what they feel to be good literature. And yes, i think a plot is needed, after all reading about ideologies in a plain descriptive form doesn't allow us to see how they are applied to everyday situations and how they relate to us which also inspire the feeling.
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