Top Ten Reasons Why Students Need More Literature

In uniquely powerful ways, literary study prepares students for richly rewarding and meaningful lives. No
other reading experience or learning activity duplicates this preparation.
1. Imagination: Reading literature cultivates the imagination. Thats one reason why tyrants and dictators
hate literature, banning or strictly controlling it. From the ancient Greeks to the present day, cultures
steeped in literary study have thrived on creativity and innovation.
2. Communication: Writing and talking about literature helps prepare students to write and talk about
anything. Not only are they working with words, with carefully considered language, but they are also
considering how different kinds of people think and react to and understand words.
3. Analysis: Literary workswhether fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfictionchallenge readers to
make connections, to weigh evidence, to question, to notice details, to make sense out of a rich
experience. These analytical abilities are fundamental life skills.
4. Empathy: Because literature allows us to inhabit different perspectives (Whats it like to be a teenage
girl, a Jew, in Nazi Germany? How would you feel if you thought your father had been murdered but no
one else believed that?), in different times and places, we learn to think about how other people see the
world. We can understand and persuade and accept and help these others more effectively and fully.
5. Understanding: We think in terms of stories: this happens, and then that happens, and whats the
connection between these events, and what is going to happen next? People whove experienced more
stories are better able to think about actions and consequences. Experience is the best teacher; literature
is the best vehicle for vastly enlarging our possible experiences.
6. Agility: Literary works often ask us to think in complex ways, to hold sometimes contradictory, or
apparently conflicting ideas in our minds. As brain imaging has shown, this kind of processing helps us to
be more mentally flexible and agileopen to new ideas.
7. Meaningfulness: Literary works often challenge us to think about our place in the world, about the
significance of what we are trying to do. Literary study encourages an examined life a richer life. It
provides us with an almost unlimited number of test cases, allowing us to think about the motivations and
values of various characters and their interactions.
8. Travel: Literature allows us to visit places and times and encounter cultures that we would otherwise
never experience. Such literary travel can be profoundly life-enhancing.
9. Inspiration: Writers use words in ways that move us. Readers throughout the ages have found reasons
to live, and ways to live, in literature.

10. Fun: When students read literature that is appropriate for them, its intensely fun. Movies are
enjoyable, but oftentimes the written version, readers will say, is more powerful and engrossing. Students
who dont find literature to be a whole lot of fun are almost certainly reading the wrong things (too difficult,
too removed from their interests), and not reading enough (perhaps they are slogging line by line, week
by week, through a text beyond their growing capabilities). When students do discover the fun of
literature, they will read more and more, vaulting forward in verbal skills and reasoning abilities, and
becoming better readers and writers of other kinds of texts (letters, memos, legal briefs, political
speeches, etc.).
What is literature?
Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value:"Literature must be an analysis of e
xperience and a synthesis of the findingsinto a unity" (Rebecca West).
Types of Literature
Drama
A play or drama offers another classical literary form that has continued to evolve over the years.
It generally comprises chiefly dialogue between characters, and usually aims at dramatic /
theatrical performance (see theatre) rather than at reading. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, opera developed as a combination of poetry, drama, and music. Nearly all drama took
verse form until comparatively recently. Shakespeare could be considered drama. Romeo and
Juliet, for example, is a classic romantic drama generally accepted as literature.
Poetry
A poem is defined as a composition written in verse (although verse has been equally used for
epic and dramatic fiction). Poems rely heavily on imagery, precise word choice, and metaphor;
they may take the form of measures consisting of patterns of stresses (metric feet) or of patterns
of different-length syllables (as in classical prosody); and they may or may not utilize rhyme. One
cannot readily characterize poetry precisely. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes
some significant use of the formal properties of the words it uses the properties attached to the
written or spoken form of the words, rather than to their meaning. Metre depends on syllables and
on rhythms of speech; rhyme and alliteration depend on words that have similar pronunciation.
Some recent poets, such as E. E. Cummings, made extensive use of words' visual form.
Short story
The short story is a literary genre of fictional, prose narrative that tends to be more concise and
"to the point" than longer works of fiction such as novellas (in the modern sense of the term) and
novels. Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a
swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point.
Novel
A novel (from, Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story
of something new") is today a long written, fictional, prose narrative. The seventeenth-century
genre conflict between long romances and short novels, novellas, has brought definitions of both
traditions into the modern usage of the term.

Legend
Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified historicized narrative
performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation
of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values of
the group to whose tradition it belongs."

Poetry
-A language
arranged in lines with regular rhythm, meter
and
often with definite rhyme scheme
Use
figurative language
rhythmical creation of beauty
Edgar Allan Poe
a.
Narrative Poetry
intends to tell a story
- Usually
relates the events in an order of time
^
Types
1.Epic
tells about the adventures of a traditional hero important to the history2.
Ballad
meant for singing &usually deals with subject such as love, honor or death3.
Metrical Romance
- is a long rambling love story in revolving around knights, lords and their ladies4.
Metrical Tale
deals with any emotion or phrase of life & is often told in simple manner
b.
Lyric poetry
- meant to be sungfocus on the writers feeling
^
Types
1.Ode

most majestic type2.

Elegy


poetic lamentation for the dead3.
Sonnet

can be distinguished by its form for it always consist of 14 rhymed lines4.

Idyll
a descriptive poem of rural or pastoral character which expresses the poets feeling of his
immediate landscape5.
Song
has a particular melodious quality6.
Simple Lyric
includes all those lyric poems that dont belong under the other types
c.
Dramatic Poetry
- focus on the characters feelings- designed to be spoken or acted on stage

These are plays whose dialogues are written in the form of poetry1.
Comedy

a dramatic play of light and humorous character w/ a cheerful or happy ending2.

Tragedy

portrays struggle of a strong

willed protagonist against fateEx. 5 great Shakespearean Tragedies~ Hamlet

indecision~ King Lear

parental love~ Macbeth

ambition~ Othello

conjugal love~ Romeo and Juliet

young love3.
Dramatic History

a dramatic play dealing w/ past historical event4.

Farce

a comic play marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot5.

Melodrama

characterized by heavy use of suspense, sensational episodes, romantic sentiment andconventional

happy ending6.
Masque

a form of dramatic entertainment of the 16

th
& 17
th
century performed by masked actors7.
Dramatic Monologue

a long speech In a play or a story delivered by a single person

Prose
Its structure is in terms of sentences and paragraphs
Types of Prose
I.
Prose Drama

Like poetic plays but written in prose form

II.
Essay

A prose composition w/c discusses a particular subject.

III.
Prose Fiction
- A prose composition w/c
imaginatively created
A.
Prose Allegory
Is a narrative prose from in w/c abstract ideas are personifiedProlonged metaphor or symbolic representation
B.
Prose Romance
A prose narrative treating imaginary characters, events, time or place, and usually heroic, adventure
ormysterious.
C.

Tales of Adventure
Deals w/ stories involving danger & unknown risks or mans encounter w/ nature
D.
Novel
-a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, portraying characters, actions, and scenes
representative of real life in a more or less intricate plot
E.
Novelette
Shorter than a novel, longer than a short story
F.
Short Story
A prose narrative about 10,000 words to be read in 1 sitting
G.
Fable
Stories about animals
H.
Parable
Stories from the bible
I.
Myth
Deals w/ supernatural beings, gods, and goddess
J.
Legend
Deals w/ the origin of things
K.
Folktale
Is characteristically anonymous, timeless and placeless tale circulated orally among people
L.
Fairytale
Is a narrative of adventures involving fantastic forces and beingsHappy ending

Masterpieces of World literature

Bible
Quran
Illiad and Odyssey
Cod of Hamurabi
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Hunterberry tales
the Indian mahabharata
divine comedy
el cid conquiador
the songs of roland
Egyptian book of the dead
book of days- Confucius
Arabian nights