Why do you read literature?

[Ranoo]

hi,
Our Prof. asked us this question "why do we read literature?"

Each one of us answered from her own point of view.

what about you?why do you read literature?

[Virgil]

I read literature because I enjoy understanding art and literature is a literary art form. The novel is the most comprehensive art form of any medium.

[Laindessiel]

I agree. And it gives you that sort of emotion that no other experience can bestow upon you, and it is without a price but using your mind. I love reading books that leads me into a labyrinth and I come out only when I start to put down the book; but apparently not even! My favorite form is Fiction - where everything unimaginably unreal is hypothetically feasible. And you know what, I have never read any fiction book yet that I didn't like! Currently, I am reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and after that, there are still five more worlds to explore! I'm excited! But I wish I had a Time-Turner to not let Time just pass away.

I JUST LOVE TRAVELLING IN MIND.

[kilted exile]

To escape......

[Laindessiel]

One good point.

[bluevictim]

The novel is the most comprehensive art form of any medium. That's a pretty bold claim, and I disagree, but I guess a discussion about what is the most comprehensive art form of any medium (if there is such a thing) should be left for another thread.

It's hard to enumerate the reasons why I read literature. Sometimes I read because I like a good story. Sometimes I want to escape (as someone else mentioned). Sometimes it's because I enjoy the beauty of a poem. Sometimes I read because the literature brings up interesting questions to think about. Sometimes I'm just trying to impress other people. Usually it's a combination of those things and others.

[kathycf]

Hmm, lots of reasons. Escapism, enrichment, to learn, to relax, fun.

[subterranean]

I got time that needs to be killed.

[Annamariah]

Through literature I can experience things I could never experience in my normal life. Reading is also a way to learn many things in a nice way and get new ideas and learn to see things in a new light.

[EAP]

For fun.




TOO SHORT TOO SHORT TOO SHORT

[ClaesGefvenberg]

why do you read literature?Above all, because I want to. So why do I want to? Well, I have this seemingly unquenchable craving for knowledge... I am, in other words, a very inquisitive bloke.


Through literature I can experience things I could never experience in my normal life. Reading is also a way to learn many things in a nice way and get new ideas and learn to see things in a new light.Well said, and I fully agree.

/Claes

[Virgil]

That's a pretty bold claim, and I disagree, but I guess a discussion about what is the most comprehensive art form of any medium (if there is such a thing) should be left for another thread.



Without getting into a discussion--we can save that for another time--what art form do you think is most comprehensive? And by comprehensive I mean capturing human experience, cultural values, and abstract ideas within an artistic medium.

[Eagleheart]

To analyze and understand myself through mediums...
/ hushhh - now this is rather unpleasant to realize when openly expressed/

[Turk]

Tell your professor my point of view too. I read literature. Becuase they write it.

[Jolly McJollyso]

I read literature because I enjoy understanding art and literature is a literary art form. The novel is the most comprehensive art form of any medium.
Damn skraight.

[Hippolite]

I read literature for knowledge. Science is very useful if you want a reliable method for learning things that aren’t very important. Philosophy is an entertaining game but always leaves one just shy of the mark. Religion comes close and seems in fact to work for some but for me it has little affinity. The truth that is actually useful and meaningful is ineffable and can only be described via literature, or perhaps I should say via art in general, and only by those few transcending artists who have spent their whole lives contemplating the human condition (or the even fewer who seem to have been practically born with such insight). Certain artists have touched the transcendent essence of the human condition and since the human condition is at its core the entirety of our essential reality they are the ones who have come closest to describing the underlying nature of existence.

Other times I read just for the hell of it or because I have nothing better to do.

[byquist]

Just to find some little glint or spark of genius shining though, some new idea, no more repetition of the same old warn-out re-tread concepts. Latest query is Shakespeare's comment in MfM, Escalus: "Some run from breaks of ice ..." Does Shake. literally mean that some people, when the ice starts cracking, that they high tail it out of there and escape danger, or is Shake. talking in some symbolical way?

[dramasnot6]

"we read to know that we are not alone"-CS Lewis
Thats definetly a big reason for me. I read for understanding, of myself, of the world, of other worlds. Everytime i put down a book its like saying goodbye to a friend. And what book im currently reading makes a big impact on my world at the time. If i read a certain book one week and had to make a decision, it would have been very likely i would have made it differently(or at least thought about it differently) if i had been reading a different book. When i am able to somehow relate and ENJOY a world different then my own it makes me feel more in touch with humanity. Literature extends beyond the novel into infinite contexts, and what is better then knowing you can have a part in all of those contexts just by reading?

[Jolly McJollyso]

Because it's better than reading the walls of a public bathroom stall.

By better I mean it lasts longer. There's typically not that much written on those stalls. Usually it's about 100 words, tops.

[bluevictim]

Without getting into a discussion--we can save that for another time--what art form do you think is most comprehensive? And by comprehensive I mean capturing human experience, cultural values, and abstract ideas within an artistic medium.I don't think there is an art form that can be said to be most comprehensive. Even by your restrictive definition, I can think of several forms of art that are just as comprehensive or more comprehensive than novels -- poetry, drama, movies, oratory, philosophy.

[stlukesguild]

Why do I read? More than once I have posted the following rather extended quote to answer just such a question. Because I doubt that I could put it better myself, I'll post it again. The Quote is by Walter Pater from his "Conclusion" to The Renaissance:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,–for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own...

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve–les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

SLG- To me, reading great books is a means to grasp at that exquisite passion... a contribution to my knowledge... a stirring of the senses.
Another... far more brief... quote which I quite admire also touching upon this question is from Anna Quindlen's essay, How Reading Changed my Life:

Books are the means to immortality:
... Through them we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

[Virgil]

I don't think there is an art form that can be said to be most comprehensive. Even by your restrictive definition, I can think of several forms of art that are just as comprehensive or more comprehensive than novels -- poetry, drama, movies, oratory, philosophy.

Well, philosophy is not an art form, nor is oratory. The other three are up for debate.

[bluevictim]

Well, philosophy is not an art form, nor is oratory. The other three are up for debate.That seems like a pretty arbitrary cut-off for what is and what isn't an art form, but I guess that's for another thread, too. There are plenty of other art forms besides the ones I listed that are as comprehensive as the novel, also.

[grace86]

Why do I read?

Well, most of the reasons other people have already listed are some of mine.

Reading provides for me an adventure that I normally wouldn't get to experience. I can feel all sorts of emotions without having to subject myself to them in real life. I wouldn't want to feel like Vronsky in real life when all that stuff goes on with Anna.

I also read as an escape. It is amazing to just pick up a book and leave the world you are in and forget your situations to be engulfed by a story.

When I read I am introduced to philosophies I might not have thought about before and it is an exercise for my brain to think upon new things. Reading is also a way in which I can learn about someone's soul without even knowing them personally.

And yes, it is pretty awesome sometimes to be caught reading and be thought of as smart. My vocabulary skills improve with every book I read, and with this I also become a better writer.

Sometimes, reading is just like watching a movie for me, I do it for the heck of entertainment.

[summer grace]

I like to read literature, especially poetry because it's so often insightful. You read it, and realize something that you never thought of before, but that seems so true to you, because you are reading it. As well, you might have thought something or felt an emotion, and then you read a poem or novel/short story that puts it the way you have always thought of it, but could never express. Or, you just recognize what you have thought of or felt expressed by someone else, in another time. It makes you feel connected to the past.

[Sasipak]

I am really obsessed with literature because of its charm.Literature teaches me a lot of useful things in common life which I should know.It teaches me history especially,without having read a pure history book. Anyway,I have decided to study in the field of literature surely

[V.E.Sweets]

As someone else said to escape. For this reason, I think that the best literature is that which is as far from reality as possible. Of course most people would disagree and say realism is the ultimate form of litt but this is just my opinion. Guess I kind of got off topic there.

[bhekti]

Why do I read Literature?

Things go very fast through me. I hardly know what they are, whether I know them or not, whether they are good or bad for me. I read literature because it can slow them down so that I can know them. Sometimes I can even add them something from myself... Yes, because literature slows down life.

[Shadowsarin]

Because my life is all about fiction, and fiction literature is one aspect of that. I won't make any claims its better than so and so, its all opinion.

Also, I agree with the escapism point too.

[ericaleatdelphi]

Do you read out of interest? To acquire knowledge? Why?

[Redzeppelin]

I read literature because a great book is like a person - any time spent with a person or great book returns great rewards. Just as you never really "reach the end" of knowing somebody, I think the same is true of a great book - you never reach the end of what it can teach you - about life, love, yourself, everybody else. Sometimes, when I'm teaching, I tell students that great books are like structures - some are modest homes with a few interesting rooms; but others (like Hamlet, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, The Sound and the Fury) are immense mansions with rooms that one can never fully explore because they seem to go on forever.

[Mason]

Tell your professor my point of view too. I read literature. Becuase they write it.

Do you use weapons because people make them?

[Conn]

I like what Mason said but I think that if you have a good thoughtful reason for using everything made (such as defending your country) then why not use it because it was made

[summer grace]

I read literature because a great book is like a person - any time spent with a person or great book returns great rewards. Just as you never really "reach the end" of knowing somebody, I think the same is true of a great book - you never reach the end of what it can teach you - about life, love, yourself, everybody else. Sometimes, when I'm teaching, I tell students that great books are like structures - some are modest homes with a few interesting rooms; but others (like Hamlet, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, The Sound and the Fury) are immense mansions with rooms that one can never fully explore because they seem to go on forever.

I really like this definition, and could not agree with it more. When you read something at one point in your life, you might not have the perspective or experiences to really understand as you might later. Or, you may come back to it later, and you might see something in it more than you did before. You are ALWAYS learning, in short.

[Shannanigan]

Because literature is a way of experiencing and learning about things that I may never be able to experience or learn otherwise...I am not rich enough to see the world nor immortal enough to read every book ever written, but I would like to see all that I can through the eyes of other writers...

[masterlibrarian]

why do you read literature?[/COLOR][/SIZE]

Because I cannot image my existence without it:)

[andave_ya]

I read because I thirst. I thirst for worlds beyond this one. I thirst for new people who will not judge me for being pedantic. I long for knowledge not found in schoolbooks. I read because by reading I learn what takes other people a lifetime to learn. I read to be able to see the minds of people greater and better than I. I read because reading stretches my imagination. I read, in short, because I must.

[Ms.Hanoo]

Hmmmmmmmmm

I read it because my college sad you should read:lol:

then ... I love it !!!

any way ...... this is my first year incollege for study literature:bawling: some times I fell I could not understand any thing:bawling:

i will try:D