Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

Mohamed El-Bachir El-Ibrahimi University, Bordj Bou Arréridj

Department of Letters and Foreign Languages
Major: English Level: 1st Year
Module: Introduction to Literature (ITL) Lecture: ONE

Introduction to Literature
Literature is a broad topic that no one definition can sufficiently define. Although each
individual may have his own definition of literature, it should be within the ballpark or the realm of
reason, and be supported by reasonable evidence. By inspecting different pieces of writing, one will
be able to gather adequate support for the definition he may give to the word.

What is Literature?
Literature can be defined as different forms of writing with notable qualities, consisting of an
impact on the audience, adroit use of the resource of language, and the style used by the author
which appeal to the reader.

Literature can also be regarded as an interpretation and an analysis of experience that allows
people to get a sense of the way life can be without having to brave anything in reality. They are able
to learn the lessons from a certain circumstance without having to deal with the real-life outcomes.
Literature is a tool that people use in order to share lessons and experiences with all people through
writing. It most often has a major message or moral.

Origins of Literature
Poetry and song were the earliest means used to preserve and convey literary traditions, and
they have persisted to the present as forms of literature. Other forms (drama and narrative prose)
appeared later and received their greatest impetus from the ancient Greeks. The dramatic tragedies of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the comedies of Aristophanes, were all written in
poetic form, but they were a new way of executing poetry in contrast to earlier lyric poetry or the
epic. Poetry as drama, brilliantly developed by the Greeks, continued to be used with great effect
by a number of other authors. These include William Shakespeare during the Renaissance and T. S.
Eliot in the 20th century, to name only two.

Most literature published today is in the form of prose, ‘a term that covers the essay, novel,
philosophical treatises, histories, and modern journalism.’ From ancient Greece and Rome and the
Middle East there have survived a large number of remarkable and readable prose works, including
the writings of the physician Hippocrates; the mathematical treatises of Archimedes; the
philosophical books of, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius; the historical writings of Herodotus,
Polybius, Suetonius, Livy, and Tacitus; and the essays of Seneca and Plutarch.

Narrative fiction, the novel and short story were the latest literary forms to develop and belong
mostly to the modern period. Prose fiction did, ‘however, have some few antecedents in the ancient
world. The Greeks wrote romances and adventure stories comparable in length to a long short story.
The first really extended piece of fiction that deserved to be called a novel was the ‘Satyricon’ by the
Roman Petronius Arbiter who died about AD 66.

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Literature for every one
Literary works have become available to large numbers of people throughout the centuries: this is
mainly the result of two phenomena: the profusion of the printed word since the invention of the
printing press in the 15th century and the presentation of works in other than printed forms such as
motion pictures, radio, and television.

Why study literature?

1. Literature reflects human ideas, beliefs, and societies. To read literature is a lesson in worldview.
We often learn how different others are in circumstances and approaches to life, as well as encounter
the diverse differences in what humans believe.

2. When we read literature, we also discover significant differences. This allows us to explore
another’s message or life, even those separated from us by time and social barriers.

3. Literature is full of human responses and reactions — in poems, essays, diaries, narratives, and in
the characters of narratives. As we respond to and analyse these, we can gain a greater knowledge of
the human psyche. At the same time, we gain a greater knowledge of ourselves and our own
responses because we most inevitably compare our lives to those in literature.

4. When we do this, we have the opportunity for discovering pride in our community and culture, for
gaining respect for another’s, and for learning love and respect for our fellow human beings in all
their diversity, complexity, and variety as we interact across cultures.

5. We don’t always agree with what we read, or we agree in part. We read literature to test the truth
of a message against our worldview.

6. We can cultivate wisdom; learn of good and evil; and experience the call to justice. Literature
cannot in itself make us a better person, but it can assist us in that quest. We learn how to discern
what is healthy and destructive in the world, and we are challenged with injustice and its
consequences. Literature may even challenge us to ask what we will do to help end the problems it
pictures.

7. Literature offers us the beauty of words and stories, and helps us learn many languages and
cultural literacy.

8. Literature can entertain us. It has much to commend a worthwhile use of leisure time. In a day of
mindless leisure pursuits, literature stands out by engaging our mind. It enriches our life by making
us aware of the world of human experience and human fears and longings. We can upgrade the
quality of our leisure time by learning to value what is excellent rather than mediocre.

9. Literature can open us to our own latent interests and talents; we may even discover part of our
vocation. Literature can challenge us to grow as individuals and as communities, and for that, it is
worth spending time with.

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 “Reading” literature
“Readers of literature don’t just read literature”. That statement has a two-part significance. First,
not all literature is similar; second, reading one genre is not the same as reading another. We don’t
read poetry in the way that we read prose fiction. In fact, we don’t read one type of poem, an ode, in
the same way that we read another type, a sonnet. Different genres – that is, different types of
literature such as epics, lyrics, sonnet, elegies, comedies, tragedies, novels, short stories, vignettes,
essays, non-fiction prose, and autobiographies demand different ways of reading. We read for the
literary techniques or devices specific to the genre of the work we read (or perhaps more accurately,
we read presupposing that we will encounter and experience and base our discernment of meaning
upon the devices employed in that genre). To a certain extent, genre and technique go hand-in-hand;
nevertheless, many techniques are common to many forms of language use and can be found in
many genres.

Judging literature
A common, but very general, way of identifying the qualities that characterize literature as
‘good’ is through the concepts of depth, complexity and quality.

The basic idea behind depth and complexity is that literature, as does any art form, represents
human experience in a way that is both revealing and compelling, that tells us something about the
world, holds it up for our examination, and does so in a way that engages us. This telling about the
world will also tell us about ourselves, about the nature of human experience.The skilful use of the
resources of the art form in evoking depth and complexity is known as quality.

1. Complexity

The idea behind complexity is that our human experience is:

 Governed by a number of interacting factors: environment, character, situation and so forth, and
 Comprised of a number of different elements -- thought, feeling, sensation, memory, imagination,
significant symbols, conventions, culturally-formed ways of saying and thinking.

Representation of experience which best evokes all of these varying, and interconnected
elements of our experience will give us the truest sense of the world and its meanings, and of what it
is to live life. That’s the gist of the argument which values complexity.

2. Depth

The concept of depth as a value begins with the idea that we are historical and symbolic beings
who are formed largely by culture but who also have common human needs, and who experience life
with the complexity that has just been referred to. Depth is the word used to capture the
representation of the symbolic and historical meaning of life:

 to explore the hidden forces of which we are seldom aware;

 to invoke, often through images, the ways in which we think and feel that are not usually represented
in common speech;
 to disclose and dramatize the often hidden effects of history and culture.

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 There is more to us than our surface, more to life than our physical sense of it. For a work of
literature to have depth is for it to create a sense of this, to define some of the forces and feelings
which give resonance to our being.

3. Quality

In order to evoke the complexities and the depth of experience, literature has to use all of its
resources well:

 an apt, precise and powerful use of language, one which uses the resources of sound, connotation
and description to evoke the experiences to which the language refers;
 a feel for the telling detail, and for the comment, incident, nuance of behaviour or feeling which will
evoke the most intense and illuminating response, the clearest and most complex or most immediate
realization of the experience being described;
 a use of comparison which illumines;
 the putting into play of conflictual and supportive relationships between ideas, incidents, voices and
characters which brings us as fully as possible into the lived experience of life with all its tensions,
ambiguities, richness and meaningfulness;
 the drawing on our stock of knowledge in order to embed the matter of the text, with all its power
and meaning, in the context of our social, historical, and personal lives, and
 the drawing on our previous knowledge of literature in order to enrich this work with the experience
and meanings of other works: we should remember that reading literature is something that one
learns to do (it is not a natural capacity), and that literature, like any art form, has its own traditions
of meaning, the understanding of which are important to being able to respond fully to the text.

The more the resources of language and meaning are used to reveal the depth, complexity, lived
experience, and full potential meaning of the issues and events introduced by a work, the more we
say this work has quality.

Conclusion
There is a darker side of literature, however, that must be considered as well. Literature has the
power to pass on cultural attitudes in a largely unconscious way. As William Doty has it, any work
of literature implicitly takes some stance toward the social order: that is, toward the kinds of
behaviour that is expected of members of different groups; or the rights and privileges that grow or
are denied to this or that category of person. A work of literature may explicitly affirm the social
order, or may overtly challenge it. More commonly, however, the work may take the social order for
granted, may treat the pattern of social relationships as “understood.”

The folk tales, religious stories, canonical works of literature, historical legends, and even
popular fiction we share as a people form our mythos, which conveys (without having to explain) the
logos of our society, our beliefs about what is good and evil, about how our society came to be and
what qualities and conditions are necessary to keep it alive, about different categories of people
should relate to each other in order to maintain social harmony.