LITERATURE

- Has different meanings depending on who’s using it

- It should have a literary form
- Anything that has expressions
- ALWAYS A FORM OF SELF-EXPRESSION

Taken from Oxford English Dictionary:

 Literature is literally an “acquaintance with letters” (from the Latin littera
meaning letter);
 A collection of texts or works of art;
 The class of writings in which imaginative expressions, aesthetic form,
universality of ideas, and permanence are characteristic features, as fiction,
poetry, and drama;
 It may also mean any printed material

Robert Frost
 Literature is “a performance in words.”

Henry Van Dyke

 Literature consists of “writings which interpret the meanings of nature and
life, in words of charm and power, touched with the personality of the
author in artistic forms of permanent interest.”

Arsenia Tan of University of Santo Tomas

 Literature is life which presents human experience
  Literature existed because there are people who wanted to express their
feelings, emotions, and experiences, in writing. They used letters, words,
sentences, and the whole composition in artistic manner to convey what
they perceive about life.

 Literature is a term used to describe WRITTEN OR SPOKEN MATERIAL.

 Broadly speaking, “literature” is used to describe anything from creative

writing to more technical or scientific works, but the term is most commonly
used to refer to the works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry,
drama, fiction, and nonfiction.

Importance of Literature
 As we watch or read the life of others, we get something in life that we can apply
to our own
 Life could be learned from the life of others
 It is in Literature where hopefully students learn the art of living

How to Study Literature

 First concern is the subject that the author wanted to figure out in us. Subject
could be anything under the sun like love, forgiveness, regret, courage, nature,
etc.
 Next, the technical part, which the writer employed to make his idea be written
with art and beauty. It is here where the students have to be acquainted with
the different literary genres and their elements.
 It is a great help for the student to study the different literary genres or types so
that he may appreciate literature more.

FORMS OF LITERATURE
The two main divisions of Literature are PROSE and POETRY:

1. POEM
 a composition usually written in verse
 It relies 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.
2. PROSE
 It consists of writing that does not adhere to any particular formal structures
(other than simple grammar).
 It is spoken or written language without metrical structure as distinguished
from poetry or verse.