Community Without A Written Literature example essay topic

Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as manifestation humanity's multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, on our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in a relationship that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. The bond that literature establishes among human beings compels them to enter into dialogue. The bond also makes them conscious of a common origin and a common goal to exceed all temporal barriers. Literature transports us in to the past and links us to those who in the past eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through texts such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison that have come down to us, those text that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human experience across tome and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature.

It is important for this to happen so that we can learn from the past to improve our future. One of Literatures first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision. According to Randy Fitzgerald, "with less richness and nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts" (64).

Without reading and untouched by literature will resemble a community of mutes and those of lost expressions afflicted tremendous problems of communication due to its crude and rude language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person who speaks much but he / she will say little words such as curse words, because his / her vocabulary is lacking in the means for self-expression. Reading Literature is not only a verbal expression, but also represents a limitation on intellect and in imagination.

It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason to grasp our knowledge and ask what is the importance of life? We learn how to speak correctly -- and deeply and subtly -- from good literature and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to have at one's disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find appropriate expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel. In a secret way, words repeat in all our action, even those actions that seem far removed from language. We might read a situation in literature one day and the next day what we read came too real.

Thanks to literature, language evolves and reaches high levels of refinement and manners that increases the possibility of human enjoyment. Literature has even served to change views upon love and desire and the sexual act itself that status of artistic creation. Without literature, love and pleasure would be poorer, lack delicacy and exquisiteness, and would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read and love stories value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television's soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts. Work Cited Fitzgerald, Randy.

"Inner City Literature". Reader's Digest. (June 2001): 62-71.