Literature matters to your life. As you begin to study literature, you might have thought to yourself, why do I have to read this, what am I supposed to get out of it, what does this mean and what’s the point? These are all very basic questions that I often hear from people who are not as interested in literature, and they are very valid. Many times when you come into a discipline like literature, it’s difficult from the outside perspective if you don’t already have the taste for literature to understand what kind of relevance it could have to you, your job, your future career, or just your personal life. So I want us to think through these questions and to take them seriously so that we can understand how these questions inform our study of literature and its importance.
So, all of these questions can essentially be answered by saying that the story is about identity. Literature is actually essential to how you understand your own identity. Some points we’ll discuss include that all cultures have stories, no matter how different they may appear. Stories are a unifying element of human experience, and story is the way that we process experience. So when you think in terms of literature, I want you to stop thinking of it as something that is out there separate or external to yourself and instead begin to recognize the way that story is part of your personal identity. One of the ways you might see this first is in the way that we tend to have conversations with a narrative structure. If you haven’t talked to someone recently or have something surprising happen to you, introduce a story to a listener. And you already understand the story structure which tends to underlie a lot of our conversations. You determine characters involved in the action, you emphasize important points of the plot, and you might pause for dramatic effect. And then you’ll lead someone up to the punchline to the conclusion of the important point of the story that you’re telling. So in all of these ways, you’re already sharing conversation narratively, and that becomes a big part of how literature begins to function: it starts in our personal interactions, and then it becomes something that’s written down and translated, and it becomes bigger than a person, but it really all begins with thinking of our lives as actual stories, the story becomes essential to our understanding of self because when we tell stories and our experiences we do so because we actually process information narratively, so we’re telling stories to explain events or to give a sense of personal history.
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What I want you to understand is that literature is really just like you. So, the stories that you’re reading are coming out of cultural backgrounds where authors have taken characters and ideas and different personalities and events and shaped them into literature. So, authors are picking out the stories that have major plot points, that would be representative of certain people’s cultural experiences, they write them down, and then we read them because we can recognize in them something common to our own experiences. So when you read literature, you should be able to find some point of identification, being able to recognize stories that are uniquely human and that transcend cultural barriers. So that’s really the importance of literature is that it puts down in writing and records these common human experiences that we can all recognize and feel that we’re a part of in some way, regardless of where the author comes from or what personal backgrounds they have, they’re saying something that could be representative of personal human experience overall.
Even if you don’t feel personally connected to literature because you don’t enjoy the reading process, you’re still encountering stories in a lot of different forms, primarily in terms of film, which also has a similar narrative structure, and also drives a lot from different literary texts. So I want you to think through why literature matters. It’s really a record of all these different stories that went beyond one person’s experiences to become a story of natural national cultural or universal human identity. It started because they provide us with that sense of cultural connection and identity, demonstrating common human experiences and helping us understand essential parts of our lives, death, birth, joy, tragedy, and all those kinds of big ideas. Stories help us to contextualize those and to feel both entertained in the sense of perhaps a superhero movie where we can look at heroism and think about what our values and our ideals are for heroism, as well as educated in terms of something like a documentary or a text that’s a memoir when you’re reading about someone’s personal experiences going through a struggle that you might or might not have experienced yourself. Stories are teaching us who we were in the past, who we are now, and who we have the potential to be, so they’re forming two different goals here - entertainment, pleasure, versus instruction or education - whether that’s historical or present-day social problems, or thinking about how we can be better in the future. So all of these different purposes are why literature is created and why it can speak to your life whether or not you are an English major, or whether or not you have a career in English studies.
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