Homework Help

Visit Literature Homework Help for even more answers from real teachers, or ask your own question..

Why is the study of literature important? What skills do students learn through reading literature?

Why is the study of literature important? What skills do students learn through reading literature? What is
gained from reading literature and evaluating it?

While reading and studying literature certainly offers to train students in the practical skills of reading
comprehension and analysis (among many others), it also encourages students to develop a sense of empathy
for the characters found in what they read. This empathy can, in turn, manifest itself beyond the text in the
interactions readers have with other members of humanity in day to day life. Reading accounts of racism in
the Deep South within the pages of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, or descriptions of sexism in Virginia
Woolf's A Room of One's Own can inform the reader's own understanding of these ideals. Reading of the
struggles of characters as they battle, often unsuccessfully, social stigmas can force the reader to recognize the
negative consequences of such injustices even if they do not experience them personally. By recognizing these
issues in literature, the reader becomes more attuned to them in their life beyond the text. Thus, literature can
influence how readers view the world and others around them, causing them to feel empathy for others where
once there was none.

The study of literature expands a student’s horizons just as earth sciences help us study the basic structures of
the geographical and geological world around us. In many ways, literature also studies the structures that we
create to understand the abstract ideas, thoughts, concerns, traditions and ways of life from a multitude of
perspectives. Like a crystal with many facets, this study helps fulfill a reader’s own quest for understanding
and curiosity. It helps shape the world they face or the past that helps inform the present. Students of literature
begin to learn life skills that will help them develop their own points of view as they consider the stories that
unfold in every piece of literature they read. These life skills include developing a map of the universal
concerns and archetypes that storytellers explore. As a student explores this map, they begin to understand
why storytelling has been so relevant to the enrichment of every culture throughout history. They are able to
distinguish what types of stories seem to resonate most for people looking to explore all the aspects of
humanity that broaden our appreciation of the relationships we build among those in our own societies and
across cultural divides while considering social factors and the natural world. They begin to realize how
important it is to consider the characters in a story as a means to identify cultural heroes, villains, their
personalities, their strengths and weaknesses. In understanding character traits, actions, and how they navigate
in a story’s plot, a student can reflect on themselves and their own sympathies, their own sense of right and
wrong, their own curiosity about psychology, ideas and values. In today’s world, students can gain a lot of
examples of values and individual qualities that aren’t just stated as hashtags online without context.
Storytelling bears out qualities like honor, wisdom, understanding, patience, sinister cruelty, revenge and
compassion to show the struggles that characters face. It maintains the interest of the reader in witnessing
whether the character changes over the course of the story to either rise to the challenge and overcome their
greatest internal or external challenges or fail because of shortcomings or the understanding that the world in
the book will not allow them to achieve their aim. This helps students reflect on their own lives and adapt
their own self-awareness to the qualities they themselves wish to develop within themselves. They can
skillfully begin to see the potential for how to tackle the world around them, gauging and comparing their
lives to characters they’ve read about. In the process, they learn how great stories are written and told. Since

1
the humanities help all of us study society and culture in order to provide us a chance to see how we process
and document existence, studying the work of authors allows a student to develop an appreciation for
storytelling as a matter of interpretation. This is so crucial to our understanding of life, given that students will
face so many interpretations of life in their own lives. They may begin to be able to develop a skill that sees
patterns of thoughts and concerns from a time period. This skill helps define the main issues that many
authors tackle using different genres, literary devices and storytelling approaches. This broadens a student’s
own views as they consider various authors’ views on a subject that fascinates them. It can encourage their
own thoughts and help them consider how they can express themselves by developing their own voice, which
is an enriching experience. As they deepen their own human experience through exposure to different
literature in studying the humanities, students grapple with important themes in life both in fiction and how
this translates to their own life and decisions. This skill is highly valuable in helping determine someone’s
preferred character in life and by understanding how certain characters act in their quests for power, fame,
glory, facing mortality, attaining wealth, or rising above circumstances. Consequently, students can see
beyond their own assumptions and opinions. This exchange of ideas advances one of humanity’s most
fascinating developments: the ability to convey what a society through its authors holds dear and those
traditions that help us deepen our own experience. They can then avoid a shallower existence that avoids
challenging our minds and hearts to gain a bigger understanding of the world outside a narrow definition of
humanity and our basic needs. It can help them open their minds to study philosophy, science, spiritual
subjects, laws, the natural world, sociology, history, politics and economics. It can open the door to
understanding how complicated life’s choices can be. It can also help a student fundamentally unravel some
of their own expectations as they read a story and an author asks them to question their own expectations
about answers to enduring questions about life within a story. Therefore, it builds their intellectual curiosity. If
they relate, the story can transform them and add value to musings they have in life. This can help them reflect
on our common fears, hopes, imaginative explorations, reactions to social conventions and representations of
life. Even if a story explores plots, characters, settings and circumstances that are very different than a
student’s own life, the advantage of reading literature is that they continue to build skills like empathy, their
own sense of self, and develop a critical view to analyze how the story impacted them. That in and of itself is
a very crucial skill. It will last with them throughout their lives as they grapple with all their own life’s twists
and turns. They learn to develop mental strength and storytelling wisdom, mentally preparing their own sense
of courage and decision-making to take on the different personalities they will encounter in their own life
through reflection and analysis. When they consider how stories have helped them look deeper within
themselves to help build themselves up in different predicaments and opportunities that life offers them, they
become more rounded individuals that can relate to more people and contribute more to the quality of our
collective lives. If the study is explored effectively, then they see the structures of the world just as those who
study earth scientists do. They see the structure of stories and how characters, settings and symbols are
described throughout an author’s work and develop their own communication skills and crystallize their own
voice. This shapes not only an understanding of the author’s exploration of aspects of humanity, but, most
importantly, helps the student shape their own continual understanding, able now to cite literary examples to
support their own point of view. This ability is one that is a transferable skill in life’s many professional and
personal circumstances.

When I was a kid I use to think of literature as the best way to get kids to basically read a movie and get us to
really think about. Literature opens up the gates for kids and adults alike to literally read through the lines and
thus apply it to every day life. Just like books are more than the words on each page like is more than the
representation people present and books challenge us to see past that.

Studying literature also gives many perspectives on life from every cultural background to lifestyles. Studying
literature truly is knowledge!

reading literature rises your emotins and you will have different look through life. i mean that you will have

2
beautiful view to yuor life, moreover you will have philosophical opinion about every thing specially about
difficulties in life.

Through the study of literature, students can develop critical thinking skills, learning how to make predictions,
weigh pros and cons, and come to conclusions based on logically thinking on the facts and information they
are presented. Literature also teaches students how to read between the lines and detect universal themes.

Also the more you read the more your writing can potentially improve. Literacy is important, and reading
comprehension is essential to function and be successful in career oriented professions and communications.

-Lissa

Literature is also a form of time travel that helps put today in context. All those apocalyptic lamentations
about how "things used to be so much better" are controverted in literature of the last generation, the last
century, all the way back to Shakespeare and beyond. Conversely, reading about how people lived in the past
can really make you appreciate what humanity is able to accomplish and endure. In the classics, you may read
about political battles, domestic abuse, prejudice and civil rights, unwanted pregnancy, binge drinking on
college campuses, gangs and juvenile crime, homelessness, nationwide economic crises caused by
speculation--as Solomon wrote thousands of years ago, there is nothing new under the sun. History tells us
what people did; literature tells us what they were thinking.

Hi

As a student studying English literature for the very first time in my life, I learnd how to appreciate literature
as it should.

All the best

Literature is important because it teaches the universal human experience. Literature provides different
meanings to different people or teach different lessons to the same person at different stages of their life.
However, what they all books or poems have in common - and this is the talent of a great writer - is that they
capture the universal human experience. Regardless of what you learn from a book or what meaning an
individual elicits from it, literature unites the reader with the universe, because there on the page is a moment,
emotion, idea that they have felt or suspected, but never been able to express. .

I agree. We may think literature is as if not in the majjor priority of study but it does help a lot. When we do
math we are able to solve problems but literature thought as how to express our selves, it is not always
clerical.

The study of literature has a civilizing effect on people. There is an extreme danger of education being used
primarily to turn out engineers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, business men and business women and other
professionals who are lacking in human feelings and who have been described as educated barbarians. The
great Leo Tolstoy wrote a sadly neglected book titled What is Art in which he explained, among other things,
the importance of all art to human society. Here is a critical excerpt which might induce some readers to look
for the book itself. (See reference link below.)

As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has
been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can in the

3
 present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their
activity and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has
assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to
man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived
through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by
men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to
others.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded
them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like
Kaspar Hauser.

And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more
savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech
itself and as generally diffused.

A lot of what is offered as art in our modern world is what Tolstoy called "counterfeit art." It is totally
insincere and produced mainly for money. Some of the characteristics of counterfeit art are imitation, and
striking and unusual effects. In popular music it can be seen that amplified noise and screaming are substitutes
for genuine feeling. Much modern painting looks like nothing more than blatant hoaxes.

Exposure to genuine art in school could conceivably help students to discriminate between real and
counterfeit art, includinig real and counterfeit creative literature. If young people do not get such exposure in
school--where are they going to get it when they leave school?

i agree 4 it adds the knowledge of society the lifestyle the vocabulary critical analysis...but the best is it gives
us chanc to be in a situation which one had orleardy gone through(i mean the emotions we go through while
reading a novel or poetry)...n the words and phrases used makes it magical leaving behind the impact giving
us wide perspective of life..we simply learn from others life(atleast a part which touch us)

#17 i just luved not to judge but to b aware

Literature is not a mere subject, it's a study of the society we live. Literature can be found everywhere not
only in the books but also in the roads, and even in the classrooms. What we find in books is just written
documents of knowledge about society.

So learning literature helps to analyze the situations easily, providing an insight. At the same time, literature
helps to mould one's personalities. It can make a person look into the world from a wide angle. All and all it is
a subject for life, not to judge but to be aware.

I agree with all of the above discussions; but I am especially gratified to read what spearfam has written: that
literature enhances our capacity to empathize.

People talk about the intellectual values of literature: critical thinking, citing evidence and so on. But, I value
literature most of all for its emotional and esthetic appeal.

4
Empathy is emotional; sympathy, intellectual. Literature evokes such human emotions as pity and terror
(Aristotle), love and compassion (A.C.Bradley) and many other epistemic virtues (i.e., virtues that help us to
know the world and make it better) like honor, bravery, honesty and integrity (Ramirez). But recently, Susan
Zunshine has a written a book demonstrating how the human emotion of empathy is critical in our
understanding and appreciation of the novel.

Think of any great novel: Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Jude the Obscure, Lady Chatterley's Lover,
Passage to India, Lincoln, The Namesake --in all of these excellent novels, we need empathy to fully
appreciate them.

But where do we get empathy from? Consider the odds against empathy. Even in real life we empathize with
others without actually experiencing what they exprience, a hard thing to do. How much more difficult would
it be for readers to empathize with a character who is not actually going through anything!It is all fiction!

Yet we do. Prof. Zunshine says we do this because as we read our intellectual act of reading, i.e., making
meaning from the text, triggers our neuro-cells "in some form of mirror effect," same as we would do in real
life. However, because the novelist employs one more thing that is usually not present in real life events --
esthetics --the emotional impactof novel events (pun intended) enhance our empathy. Thus, because of our
empathy we are able to not only realize the characters' emotions, we even anticipate them, Examples of what I
am saying are legion, I need not give any more here.

Zunshine's book, and spearfam's reference to literature teaching us empathy, triggered this response from me.

I am grateful for your indulgance.

Students gain a percpetion of ife, an insight into the meaning of so many things

It is this perception and insight that makes literature worthwhile. If an individual can go beyond his or her
actual experiences into literary experiences to draw upon when navigating the world, she or he will have
better abilities at navigating the world.

I discuss this with my students, and I put it simply:

If you can understand why characters act the way they do, you can understand why people act the way they
do. If you can analyze a character and situation, you can analyze any situation in life. If you can analyze a
situation, you can make a better decision. Therefore studying literature is a study of life.

Just like sociology, studying literature gives one an insight about other cultures and their norms. A simple
research on a simple essay yeilds so many results that one is lost in them. The study of literature offers so
many uncounted benefits. Firstly, it offers one a way to critically analyse every situation in a logical way. For
example. I used to watch movies before without much of critical appreciation, and just either state that i liked
it or not. But now, literature and its analyses has shown me how to critically watch a movie or read a book,
how to find the oblivious faults in it, its flawas, and the hidden plots. It offers a complete new vista of world,
and through new eyes. It also increases one's vocabulary. One also learns how one would act in such a
situation as one might have read in a book or read in a poetry.

Literature is a subject that belongs to the humanities discipline and it means that human - beings are
given an appropriate place in it . Since times immemorial human beings have been trying to evolve
better policies , better living standards for one and all and also other creatures are given their due
respect in this beautiful world . The study about how how humans adapt themselves in an environment

5
 , how their thoughts and feelings and experiences changes over time and circumstances is important .
Literature guides us about the way human beings are going in this world . Literature gives us a picture
of the thoughts, feelings and experiences about this world and human life in general . Literature is
important because it moulds our human behaviour and redirects our paths to the eternal truth .

We gain a lot of information about how people live , what they do etc and also it improves our reading
skills . We grasp beautiful phrases and words that touch us and come to improve our knowledge of
vocabulary as well as writing skills because from the words we get a picture of how we can construct
better writing .

Students gain a percpetion of ife, an insight into the meaning of so many things

Everyone makes great points. A concise summary of reasoning would be:

• Studying literature is the only way some students will ever learn about other cultures and places. This
expands their horizons.
• It shows them how characters think, react, and problem solve.
• The process students go through as they think and analyze literature builds their ability to be critical
thinkers and problem solvers.
• Sometime studying literature exposes them to words and ideas that reach into their souls and change
them forever.
• Thus, studying literature makes the world a better place.

This is a question that high school students consistently ask as they sit through another lesson on Shakespeare
or Animal Farm and so on.

Literature is the amazing tool that all the previous posts have alluded to and it gives insight into the culture of
others and of other times.

How though do we convince our high school learners of this? Only upon analysis and by making comparisons
do they show an interest, it seems to me. By then, however, it is too late for some student sbecause they never
paid attention in the first place. Teaching technique is obviously crucial - and that's another whole discussion
on its own I think. I saw a discussion post from February 2010

time periods may change, but people and society basically stay the same. The same themes
that were present in the past, are still true today, and will remain in the future.

The teacher pointed out how amazed her students were when she related The Scarlett Letter to an article from
2006 when a young woman putting her baby up for adoption

had to disclose in the newspaper her past sexual history, including every partner she had, with
a full physical description of her partners, etc

Her students could then better relate to it and were more inclined to attempt to understand it.

The study of literature enhances our ability to communicate with others by acquainting us with the worlds
other people live in, their history, geography, and culture, for example. Once we have a common reference,
we can talk to anyone with greater ease. For example, when I read The Kite Runner and actually met someone

6
from Afghanistan, I was thrilled to be able to talk to someone, having some understanding of what his native
country was like. One term, I taught The Secret Life of Bees, and what was wonderful to me was that when I
told my students I was the exact age as Lily and had lived through all the same times, it seemed to me that
they were better able to communicate with me after reading the book because they had gained some insight
into my world. Literature allows us to talk to one another more empathetically and knowledgeably.

The study of literature is important because it, at its most basic, improves reading skills. From this involved
reading of quality literature a student then develops their writing skills, as the two go hand in hand (the best
writers are avid readers, typically). Beyond these basic benefits is the development of critical thinking and
analysis skills through the study of literature.

The study of literature also helps students see the world - people, places, things, events - through different
eyes and by way of a different viewpoint. This contributes to a student forming and developing their own
belief set, opinions, views, and such.

Good stories, whether novels, short stories, plays, or poems, help students experience, in their mind, new
vistas, customs, cultures, and ways of life. This helps students see how life is different (and the same in some
ways) in other countries. Reading international literature gives students a glimpse of how people live and view
life in other lands.

From a purely academic standpoint, reading literature of high quality helps a student discern good writing
from bad writing. This helps them in their own writing.

Aside from the obvious rudimentary skills it hopefully develops--improvement in reading, composition and
vocabulary--the study of literature opens the imagination to previously undiscovered aspects of the outside
world. Continued study will reveal other specifics of the individual authors such as symbolism and thematic
intent, leading to a wider scope of the reader's own comprehension and knowledge.

If students are taught to analyze literature carefully, using all the tools available for analysis (which
presupposes the exclusion of Reader's Response, which may or may not employ analysis methods) then
students learn to think logically and critically and they learn to argue from cause to effect as well as from
effect to cause.

This sort of detailed analysis requires the mastery of such analytical tools as rhetorical techniques, even
obscure ones like litotes and chiasmus. It also requires an understanding of the fact that language carries
delimiting properties that exclude a range of interpretations. It also requires a mastery fo higher order
syntactical forms: if a student cannot understand a third conditional, the student cannot understand the overt
meaning, much less the subtle meaning, of what the author has written.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the world's greatest dictionary, defines chiasmus as,
"A grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is
inverted in the other."

Literature offers students the opportunity to discover, think, evaluate, and analyze the world around them in
broader, more universal terms. Studying literature naturally lends itself to involving those higher level
thinking skills that we as teachers so desperately want for our students. Whether its a novel-length text, play,

7
or short story, a good piece of literature can be implemented in the classroom to train our students to be higher
level thinkers.

Not only do they build their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills, students can build their
metacognitive skills while annotating literature, and then use those annotations to assist them in comparing or
contrasting, or evaluating and analyzing the text in terms of theme, conflict, figurative language, tone or
mood.

As in the study of algebra and calculus, the study of literature builds thinking skills that are native to the
subject but applicable outside the subject as well.

Skills of argumentation (logical thinking, citing evidence, etc.), intepretation, critical thinking, and writing are
all a part of the study of literature.

Literature - seen as a body of works - offers a unique education in itself, representing a wealth of ideas,
perpectives, world views, emotional insights and more, all of which enrich the reader's "ideational
vocabulary", expanding the range of thoughts and ideas available to the reader.

One of the most important skills children learn through literature is how to react to different situations.
Reading allows children to experience situations vicariously, and think about what they would do in the
character's place.

Even in the case of fantasy, this can be valuable. Our children may not fight evil trolls and wizards, but they
could face challenges where they will need friends’ help, as Harry Potter did. They may not see their father
defend a black man in an unwinnable trial, but they can appreciate the importance of standing up for what you
believe in as Atticus Finch did.

Bibliotherapy, the process of using books to help those suffering from mental disorders, can be applied to
children (sometimes called developmental bibliotherapy). Kids can be given books like Missing May when
they lose a loved one. As with adults in therapy, children can come to understand their own problems and talk
about them more easily through books.

Many are relieved to find that others have had the same disorder or problem and have coped
successfully with it or recovered from it. (enotes, see first link)

I have used books like There is a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom with elementary school students who struggle
with behavior problems, and books like The Great Gilly Hopkins for gifted kids trying to understand why they
are different. Books are great levelers, and great healers. Sometimes it’s easier to talk about a character’s
problems than your own, but you are really talking about yours.

©2019 eNotes.com, Inc.