10. Literature is a genuine human creation, a language like math and music, which does not occur in nature. What is defined as culture is a) giving nature a human form (the sounds of nature are not the sounds of music), b) the best that has been thought and said.

9. Political/Scientific reasons: Literature presents different visions of the world we want or don’t want, a way to measure and choose politicians and policies when we vote. It even guides and inspires science, as the visions of literature are being realized, such as Icarus and hang-gliding, or computers that write and respond to vocal commands, even the cellular phone, an influence from sci-fi Star Trek. Also, politicians and governments do not sink to their lowest level of brutality, inflicting the greatest misery on the greatest number, until they rationalize it in words. See Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Be able to read to know difference between ideas which are for or against life, and not accept them passively.

8. Literature reminds us of our need for primary concerns which we share with animals (especially our concerns for food and water, sex, clothing, shelter, and unimpeded movement) over secondary concerns which are our loyalties to a group/mob and beliefs like capitalism, religion, communism. Too often we go to war because we don’t like how another group thinks. Many stories are also of a paradise lost and gained (e.g. story of Eden, Atlantis, the Garden of Hesperides) and we can’t go anywhere unless nature is looked after as well, a strong message for the troubled environment we live in.

7. One often missed point: art and literature are therapeutic. Watching Hollywood movies is the most obvious application of art to cheer us up. Most movies are adaptations of books. No books = no movies, as scripts themselves are written in a literary form, and are direct descendants of drama and theatre. Books and other arts (role-playing) provide a healthy catharsis and emotional release, as a healthy mind is the basis of all health.

6. Reading stories force us to identify with the main character who often is very different from us. This ability to identify, to walk in someone else’s shoes, helps us to identify with and learn tolerance for people who dress, think, speak, act and worship differently.

Continue reading →

10        It is possible to live without criticism and just experience reading. Just as it is possible to listen and enjoy music without knowing any musical theory. Just as it is possible to enjoy nature without knowing geology, chemistry, physics, biology, all subjects whose object of study is nature. But as Aristotle says all people desire to know.

9          Criticism and its potential exist the moment a work of literature comes into being. Once a writer writes in conventions like iambic pentameter, couplets, rhyme, then the criticism which examines these conventions become relevant — in this case in the form of the New Criticism.

ANALOGY: Once living things and the human body evolved, then the subject of biology potentially exists.

 8          Criticism shows us how to teach literature. There are critical methods, which parallel scientific methods. There are finite methods of reading, as some readings are valid and some are not. Academic subjects are not democratic in the sense that everyone’s opinions matter. (Science does not admit the notion of a flat earth.) Consequently criticism should reveal the valid methods of reading which contribute to knowledge.   

7.         Criticism is defined as the theory of the use of words, the awareness of the use of words. It is a social science that studies the effect of words on society, the use of words and images by literary writers, as well as the mass media, advertising, politics. It shows us the different ways of reading art, the verbal arts, applied arts, sciences, applied sciences, people and society. 

6.         We are affected by words as much as we are by the weather. Orwell’s major theme: If words are smashed and deprived of their meaning and readers become illiterate, then society cannot change for the better and most likely will turn for the worse. 

5          Criticism helps to relate literature to society. For better or worse, the critic is the pioneer and shaper of culture, a professional reader of writers.

ANALOGY: for better or worse, the law is in the hands of a judge, who is not morally superior to anyone, but merely knows the law more than the average person. 

4.         Criticism has the same relationship to literature as philosophy has to wisdom, aesthetics to art, and science to nature. It relays literature’s vision of the human condition.  Criticism should and ought to progress, to explain these infinite visions of literature, which continues to relate itself to culture, now and in the future.  We do not judge works of literature. They judge us: how well we encounter and engage literature’s vision or revelation. 

3.         Literature is mute, dumb, and cannot speak. It is “not heard but overheard,”  in Mill’s phrase. It shows rather than tells. It does not, like an essay, state its theme/thesis explicitly.  Our experience of anything, including literature, is often incomplete — we need criticism to fill in the gaps and prepare us for the kind of experience we may still potentially have. 

2          A writer should be read, experienced, assessed according to the literary conventions (s)he inherits. We need the critic, the professional reader, to clarify those conventions for the average reader. 

1          The act of criticism — reading, interpreting, translating, understanding — can be as CREATIVE as the act of producing literature. There is a creative literary imagination and a creative theoretical imagination, a power to create and a power to understand. Creativity, therefore, resides not simply in literary genre (plays, poems, prose, essay) but in the writer/artist as well as the reader.