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| Can literature make you a better person? | ||||||||||||||
| This is a very interesting question posed by Dr. Sexson in class. I think you can answer this question with a "Yes" and "No" but still satisfy the question. I don't believe that reading can turn you into a better person with a turn of a page but I do believe that literature can give us the skills to be a better person if we choose so. Reading these works | ||||||||||||||
| can give us the ability to understand or see the values of people that are seen but not spoken. In others words we can figure out deeper meanings with out explicit answers. I also believe that literature can be a window to other people's culture and race leading to a society that is more tolerant. I have experienced this growth first hand through my world literature class. After reading the works of Middle Eastern, South African, and South American Authors I have come to realize the intelligence of other cultures. Wolfgang Iser said that the significance of literature does not lie in the meaning sealed with the text, but in fact that the meaning | ||||||||||||||
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| brings out what had previously been sealed within us. It is easy for us, as modern day people, to forget the importance of simple everyday pleasures like love and happiness(even sunrise and sunsets), when we spend most of our time acquiring money and power. So can literature make you a better person? I would have to say yes if we choose to see the moral side or right answers, but it is still up to us to use that information in a correct way. For Sir Philip Sidney he claims that imaginative literature ("poesy") is important above all for its moral power: it shows people the right thing to do, and it inspires them to want to do the right thing. | ||||||||||||||
| I cannot remember who said the following but I think it is a great example of how literature can help us as growing people. . -Walt Whitman's poetry fills us with joy at the multiplicity of life around us, while Henry David Thoreau challenges us to be rigorously honest with ourselves, both morally and intellectually. Richard Wright's fiction can fill us with rage at the injustice of the world, while Hermann Melville's novel Moby- Dick may lead us to distrust self-righteous rage. |
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