Literature and Ideals Essay Example for Free

Literature and Ideals EssayDefinition Literature is a term used to happen upon written or spoken material. Broadly speaking, books is used to describe anything from creative writing to much technical or scientific whole kit, only if the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction. Why do we read literature? Literature represents a language or a people culture and tradition.But, literature is more important than just a historical or cultural artifact. Literature introduces us to new worlds of experience. We learn about books and literature we enjoy the comedies and the tragedies of poems, stories, and plays and we may counterbalance grow and evolve through our literary journey with books. Ultimately, we may discover meaning in literature by looking at what the author says and how he/she says it. We may interpret the authors message.In academic circles, this decode of the text is often c arried out through the use of literary theory, using a mythological, sociological, psychological, historical, or otherwise approach. Whatever critical paradigm we use to discuss and analyze literature, there is still an artistic grapheme to the works. Literature is important to us because it speaks to us, it is universal, and it affects us. Even when it is ugly, literature is beautiful. Importance of Literature.It is a curious and prevalent picture that literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination, pleasing enough, like a new novel, but without any serious or practical importance. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature preserves the ideals of a people and idealslove, faith, duty, friendship, freedom, reverenceare the part of human life most worthy of preservation. The Greeks were a marvelous people yet of all their mighty works we cherish only a few ideals,ideals of beauty in putrefiable stone, and ideals of truth in imperishable prose and poetry.It was simply the ideals of the Greeks and Hebrews and Romans, preserved in their literature, which made them what they were, and which determined their value to succeeding(a) generations. Our democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream not the doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood, preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons.All our arts, our sciences, thus far our inventions are founded squarely upon ideals for under every invention is still the dream of Beowulf, that man may bruise the forces of nature and the foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the immortal dream that men shall be as gods, knowing grievous and evil. In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes, our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but an ideal ever endures upon earth.It is hence impossible to overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from the face of the earth. It is only when we flirt with this that we appreciate the action of the devout Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves every scrap of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too tremendously important to be neglected or lost.