Why study literature.. it is only stories…
Why study literature? It is only stories about people, not even real people. Why go through the pain of looking at literary devices: metaphor, simile, symbols? To understand life better? But those things are not real. Only ideas, only assumptions!
Sounds familiar?
Well, how many of us really reflect on what we do every day? How many of us really learn from our mistakes and have the chance to explain what really happened - word by word, with its events, the people and the emotions involved at that time? Usually when asked for an advices, the most that we can do is to say, “Don’t do this, it will hurt you, I have made the same mistake myself. I know it.” But is it really the same event, the same situation, the same feeling we are experiencing? How do we know for sure? We don’t have the time to bracket one point in time of our lives and really look into it. We lack the expertise to explain what really happened, and how did we really feel: be it during the saddest, the happiest or even the most memorable times of our lives.
Literature does that for us. It helps us to peep into the lives of the characters, their joyous moments, the mistakes the make, the way they learn or not learn from the errors, and the way they handle their lives. We make judgements and comments about those fictitious characters, saying what should and should have not been done. Since they are fictitious, no one is offended. But in the process, we start to look into our own lives. We could have done the same thing in that same situation, and since we ‘see’ the possible outcome, we could now think of alternatives to the same problem.
That is only one of the many benefits of studying literature. If today, we think that it is pointless studying the works of some dead writers, think again. We may not like the novel, the short stories, the play or the drama, but aren’t our lives a story in itself? We can never loathe it, erase our stories and to choose to write another. We ARE the writers of our life stories. We ARE making our piece of literature. Just that, no one is reading it except for ourselves.
