Like an out of body experience, literature is one way to place yourself into another life and see other places without ever leaving your own. Studying literature is more than just reading a piece of text and pulling some information from it. By reading literature, it can feel as if you are in a different moment in time. It allows readers to learn key life lessons that will stay them for the rest of their lives. Students can learn, collect material, develop their personalities, discover their likes and dislikes, and study how people interact with each other, all from studying literature. The more a person reads literature the more they can benefit from each piece of text, either in expanding vocabulary or gaining knowledge. If a student were not given the opportunity to study any form of English literature, it would leave them very misguided and at a major disadvantage compared to if they had the ability. When students read and study literature it allows them to open their mind and think harder about a specific topic or trouble, they may be facing. In the essay written by Bonnie Asselin, Rachael Price, and Brian Yost it states that “They also find validation and support for their deepening values, and by reading literature from other cultures, they find the inspiration to reject stereotypes and old prejudices.”
Literature is much more than just glimpses into a person’s thoughts, dreams, and emotions. Each piece of literature tells a different story of another life or interweaving of several lives. Reading will allow the reader to pull information that they would not be able to get anywhere else and gauge their own interpretation of what has been read. Life lessons can be learned by pulling from anothers experiences, either real or imagined. The deeper and more complex the text, the more opportunities you have for gaining more vocabulary and knowledge. Literature also allows students to learn more not just about their own society, but societies around the world from the past and present. It is more than just picking up a book and reading a few pages thinking new information will just flow in. It takes time to let a story develop, and as the text is read, a complete picture will begin to come together. A person who takes the time to study literature can look deeper into a subject than just thinking about it at surface value. Simply learning material may make you a smarter person about a specific subject but reading literature will create a more well-rounded person. Imagine reading a text about a bank robbery, and then the reader can place themselves there at the bank in that specific moment. It’s doubtful this scenario would ever happen in real life, but by reading about it, the feelings of each person involved could be read about and experienced like it really happened. With literature the writer may weave a broad story or a finely detailed story, but either way the experience will be there for the reader. “Literature has the ability to connect people through individual stories, which are often much more relatable than objective data”.
The question being asked is why would we want to study literature? In the age of the digital revolution, literature has never been more important to navigate the human experience both past and present. Readers can learn about war and human suffering and know that it is not something that should be repeated. Learning about different cultures, societies and races can help the reader understand the differences and the human experience of each one. “A scene where one can encounter friendship and guidance in life through a mirror of society or history; because of what one conceives as solitude and singularity of the individual reader, literature supposedly holds up a mirror in which every reader sees something different”.
Reading can change how a person views certain circumstances and events. Each person reading the same text may have several different interpretations of what they’ve read. This makes literature an important thing to study simple to get insight into how others interpret events. Living life day to day, we may miss certain details that make life worth living. No matter how boring and mundane daily can seem, by reading and learning, we can change how we see the outside world. Reading literature can allow the reader to imagine they are a different person, in a different time, or a different place. How else would a person be able to envision a distant battlefield, a fantastic fairyland or even a trip to space. No matter how boring our lives are, we can pick up a book and transform ourselves into another time or place. Literature is what gives us a glimpse into what we may want to be, which is why it should be studied and may give us a life lesson that never would have been possible without it.
