Essay on literature
‘Discuss critically the view that literary heritage provides the most effective way of sharing knowledge in a society.’
The definition of ‘literature’ itself is contentious, with the line strangely blurred around the edges. Most agree with the Princeton online dictionary when it defines ‘literature’ to be ‘creative writing of recognised artistic value’: mainly works of fiction, or non-fiction pertaining to matters of interest to the public. Most of the examples found from a quick internet search listed plays, poems and ‘anything of the written word’: literature today, indeed, is often alluded only to such narrow terms. However, if we take the etymological root of this word – according to Wikipedia, literally meaning ‘acquaintance with letters’, deriving from the Latin ‘littera’ (“an individual written character”) – as the basis of this discussion we may well presume ‘literature’ to mean the written repository of knowledge available to all fields of inquiry, from medical to economic to the most dues ex machina fantasy novel in living history. As if it were not enough, Wikipedia goes on to elaborate on the inclusion of oral tradition as a form of literature although being not, strictly, in print. After all, the first recorded stories came from oral tradition before a version of them was written down. We may still come to consider ‘literary heritage’ everything of words passed down to us from our ancestors, be it in writing or otherwise.
Literary heritage by the most popular definition, however, is usually reserved for the beloved ‘Great Books’, classics that endured over time and evolved into canon in the literary world (official or otherwise). These range from works of fiction such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (that remark on society in her time) to Descartes’ Meditations (on philosophy), to the teachings or records or theses of Plato and Pliny or Ptolemy. Each have gained importance and dropped from favour in their time, or still reign in importance today, relative to their relevance to the world of today. In this case, everything written on human nature is bound to remain, because human nature will always remain essential and integral as long as human societies exist: Jane Austen and Chaucer are still read and appreciated in this context. Even so, meanings might be veiled in symbolism or subtlety to avoid complications, persecution or merely for realism’s sake, and remain there to be interpreted as the reader wishes. Knowledge is shared in that the writer offers the situation for the reader’s consideration: however, knowledge is not shared efficiently in that many alternative interpretations of one phrase might be produced as the reader attempts to tease out meaning through the framework or language. And even yet some might argue that this is the virtue of works of fiction and of language, and that multiple meanings of one thing may be derived – all of them true – thereby proving the efficiency of language in conveying a set of ideas, simultaneously
And yet relying on the audience to decipher meanings presents problems of efficiency: in many cases, this ‘sharing of knowledge’ through conveying meanings depends much on the audience itself. For many, for example, ‘Twelfth Night’ is categorised as a comedy, and many of Shakespeare’s time regarded it as such. A reader of today might question its status as a comedy and, if he were a literature student, question a few parts that do not appear quite so funny by today’s standards. A latter-day scholar of Shakespeare may speak authoritatively of the dark side of the glitzy, dues ex machina world of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s hidden messages left throughout the text on class stratification, women and other pertinent issues. The audience sees things depending on what they are looking for, and this is what impedes the sharing of information – the audience sees exactly what it wants to see, and their level of satisfaction with the meaning inherent in the text depends on how deep they are inclined to dive.
Having said that, I go on now to question the integrity of literature as an effective communication of the artist’s intended ideas. Just how much can we consider something to be ‘literature’? Ideally, as mentioned in a website for brochure design (in which a glossary is included), literature should be something ‘in which compositional excellence and advancement in the art of writing are higher priorities than are considerations of profit or commercial appeal.’ And yet, as proved by many of the writers out in the wild whose main purpose in writing is to earn a living, and to the very core of accepted contemporary literary canon, the Bard himself – who made his plays palatable to the public in order to keep eating – literature panders to the public. If … even as we can clearly see that Shakespeare managed to juggle between his artistic integrity and the need for a crowd-pleaser so well that we still marvel at the insights of his works today, we can only assume its use to us in the context of the twenty-first century. Contemporary knowledge tends to have to be cautious of the social winds in which it works: literary heritage only works over time as each generation of equal bigots wither in their turn, and the next sees with differently-prejudiced eyes. Therefore the conveyance of knowledge from writer to reader or watcher or listener is not always unimpaired, and perhaps vital information could be missed.
More questionable is the definition of literary heritage: if they are to include all that has been written in the past and passed down, surely they might include texts of the less-than-usual stuff, such as perhaps fifteenth century porn: can such books be considered, in the common run, literary heritage? If not for the conveyance of ideas (some as can definitely be expected, for human nature, as said earlier, is everywhere), they do still otherwise provide knowledge in the form of their existence through the (social or moral) context in which they existed, but sometimes very little further. Their value, therefore, lies less in the ‘knowledge’ that is written, but more as a cross-reference to the culture of their time. And again, in this case, this knowledge cannot be acquired directly, but through interpretation – therefore reinforcing the dubiousness of this text as a truly efficient way of sharing knowledge.
Interpretation is particularly important as each occur through communication style and context that may have been obvious in the past but have now become obsolete. Often, centuries-old text – with language being as subject to evolution as social norms are – are incomprehensible to the modern-day reader, and present even skilled scholars with some difficulty as to the translation of meaning and mood on top of all the cultural references of the text’s time which, despite probably being assumed as common knowledge then, is in all probability completely mystifying to the modern sensibility. Related to this is the inevitable tendency for what the ancients regarded as common sense (eg. the world is flat) to be seen through our eyes as romantic (or unenlightened) fiction. Such barriers tend to hinder the efficiency of communications between ‘literary heritage’ and a society which contrives to discover knowledge from it, partly because the man on the street in a first-world country is brought up to take these things for granted, and the man on the street in a third-world country will most possibly (being likely to be uneducated) take what is said from the text for granted. And, both of these men wrapped up with the daily business of life, many would not take into concern the ‘knowledge’ of literary heritage as imperative knowledge: little interest is there, especially when the texts themselves remain mostly indecipherable and its context, quite literally, ‘out of this world’. Again the population relies on the few middlemen in between to take care of the sifting and judging of ‘useful’ information from the ‘erroneous’ knowledge: efficiency in this medium as a mode of sharing knowledge is reduced to pearls of wisdom doled out by a few.
However, literary heritage is useful as an asset for communal identities, an efficient tool in which a group of otherwise unrelated people may find an anchor and a reason for them to stay together: histories and literary works as a point of pride among cultures and as a kind of advertisement to their greatness and shared uniqueness, which creates a sense of belonging among individuals and perhaps increases their commitment to its preservation. Given the ongoing prevalence of this in the face of globalisation, one must concede that the sharing of information from these literary texts (for every Indian child to know the Ramayana, or every Chinese able to recite the Tang poems) has been efficient to say the least in the success literary heritage enjoys as the champions of culture.
With globalisation occurring throughout the world, literary heritage has also become a way for bridging communities – each with their own sets of beliefs and words that is shared in a sort of exchange, with translations (such as, for example, the works of Honore de Balzac into English) becoming common and widely available to the masses. Societies may plunder each other’s caches of literary heritage, bringing the term into a general use for all literary heritage as independent of their belonging to their various culture that, in a global village, allows the extremely efficient sharing of knowledge across societies, within a society.
In fact, if we are to see ‘literary heritage’ in the context it has been for the whole of this essay – literary heritage both in oral tradition and written text – it is inevitable that they should be the most efficient way of sharing ideas and knowledge of the past: this was what words were invented for, after all: to communicate ideas, and to repeat ideas that have been communicated so that they might be referenced to and remembered. Moreover, literary knowledge provides links between past and present; it allows those who access enough of it to see precedence, trends, and from there predict patterns of behaviour, making it more than relevant to today’s world.
However, this ‘literary heritage’ cannot maintain this same position in the context of the modern world, and if the information involves current events: such knowledge, although a part of history (because history is made constantly), cannot be considered ‘heritage’ in the same cultural-societal context, and such information – war news, the price of lobsters in the market, inspirational stories – may tend to be of vital importance to their readers: too important to be disregarded in the light of sharing knowledge. With this void to fill the less traditional premium mediums take over: the newspaper, the television, and the internet, all of them ready and able to tackle current problems in current contexts. Although their reliability may also be disputed, their means of ‘sharing’ are efficient and the readers having no choice but to take the knowledge they offer in the context in they are read, until at least the benefit of hindsight and in the wake of later events.
These two forms of communication – literary heritage and current media – deal with different varieties of information and should be considered distinct and separate: therefore it still holds that while literary heritage does not provide the most effective way of sharing knowledge in society overall, it remains so for sharing knowledge that applies to the past, across cultures, and evolution of the society itself.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=literature
http://www.brochure-design.com/brochure-design-publishing-terms.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature
The definition of ‘literature’ itself is contentious, with the line strangely blurred around the edges. Most agree with the Princeton online dictionary when it defines ‘literature’ to be ‘creative writing of recognised artistic value’: mainly works of fiction, or non-fiction pertaining to matters of interest to the public. Most of the examples found from a quick internet search listed plays, poems and ‘anything of the written word’: literature today, indeed, is often alluded only to such narrow terms. However, if we take the etymological root of this word – according to Wikipedia, literally meaning ‘acquaintance with letters’, deriving from the Latin ‘littera’ (“an individual written character”) – as the basis of this discussion we may well presume ‘literature’ to mean the written repository of knowledge available to all fields of inquiry, from medical to economic to the most dues ex machina fantasy novel in living history. As if it were not enough, Wikipedia goes on to elaborate on the inclusion of oral tradition as a form of literature although being not, strictly, in print. After all, the first recorded stories came from oral tradition before a version of them was written down. We may still come to consider ‘literary heritage’ everything of words passed down to us from our ancestors, be it in writing or otherwise.
Literary heritage by the most popular definition, however, is usually reserved for the beloved ‘Great Books’, classics that endured over time and evolved into canon in the literary world (official or otherwise). These range from works of fiction such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (that remark on society in her time) to Descartes’ Meditations (on philosophy), to the teachings or records or theses of Plato and Pliny or Ptolemy. Each have gained importance and dropped from favour in their time, or still reign in importance today, relative to their relevance to the world of today. In this case, everything written on human nature is bound to remain, because human nature will always remain essential and integral as long as human societies exist: Jane Austen and Chaucer are still read and appreciated in this context. Even so, meanings might be veiled in symbolism or subtlety to avoid complications, persecution or merely for realism’s sake, and remain there to be interpreted as the reader wishes. Knowledge is shared in that the writer offers the situation for the reader’s consideration: however, knowledge is not shared efficiently in that many alternative interpretations of one phrase might be produced as the reader attempts to tease out meaning through the framework or language. And even yet some might argue that this is the virtue of works of fiction and of language, and that multiple meanings of one thing may be derived – all of them true – thereby proving the efficiency of language in conveying a set of ideas, simultaneously
And yet relying on the audience to decipher meanings presents problems of efficiency: in many cases, this ‘sharing of knowledge’ through conveying meanings depends much on the audience itself. For many, for example, ‘Twelfth Night’ is categorised as a comedy, and many of Shakespeare’s time regarded it as such. A reader of today might question its status as a comedy and, if he were a literature student, question a few parts that do not appear quite so funny by today’s standards. A latter-day scholar of Shakespeare may speak authoritatively of the dark side of the glitzy, dues ex machina world of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s hidden messages left throughout the text on class stratification, women and other pertinent issues. The audience sees things depending on what they are looking for, and this is what impedes the sharing of information – the audience sees exactly what it wants to see, and their level of satisfaction with the meaning inherent in the text depends on how deep they are inclined to dive.
Having said that, I go on now to question the integrity of literature as an effective communication of the artist’s intended ideas. Just how much can we consider something to be ‘literature’? Ideally, as mentioned in a website for brochure design (in which a glossary is included), literature should be something ‘in which compositional excellence and advancement in the art of writing are higher priorities than are considerations of profit or commercial appeal.’ And yet, as proved by many of the writers out in the wild whose main purpose in writing is to earn a living, and to the very core of accepted contemporary literary canon, the Bard himself – who made his plays palatable to the public in order to keep eating – literature panders to the public. If … even as we can clearly see that Shakespeare managed to juggle between his artistic integrity and the need for a crowd-pleaser so well that we still marvel at the insights of his works today, we can only assume its use to us in the context of the twenty-first century. Contemporary knowledge tends to have to be cautious of the social winds in which it works: literary heritage only works over time as each generation of equal bigots wither in their turn, and the next sees with differently-prejudiced eyes. Therefore the conveyance of knowledge from writer to reader or watcher or listener is not always unimpaired, and perhaps vital information could be missed.
More questionable is the definition of literary heritage: if they are to include all that has been written in the past and passed down, surely they might include texts of the less-than-usual stuff, such as perhaps fifteenth century porn: can such books be considered, in the common run, literary heritage? If not for the conveyance of ideas (some as can definitely be expected, for human nature, as said earlier, is everywhere), they do still otherwise provide knowledge in the form of their existence through the (social or moral) context in which they existed, but sometimes very little further. Their value, therefore, lies less in the ‘knowledge’ that is written, but more as a cross-reference to the culture of their time. And again, in this case, this knowledge cannot be acquired directly, but through interpretation – therefore reinforcing the dubiousness of this text as a truly efficient way of sharing knowledge.
Interpretation is particularly important as each occur through communication style and context that may have been obvious in the past but have now become obsolete. Often, centuries-old text – with language being as subject to evolution as social norms are – are incomprehensible to the modern-day reader, and present even skilled scholars with some difficulty as to the translation of meaning and mood on top of all the cultural references of the text’s time which, despite probably being assumed as common knowledge then, is in all probability completely mystifying to the modern sensibility. Related to this is the inevitable tendency for what the ancients regarded as common sense (eg. the world is flat) to be seen through our eyes as romantic (or unenlightened) fiction. Such barriers tend to hinder the efficiency of communications between ‘literary heritage’ and a society which contrives to discover knowledge from it, partly because the man on the street in a first-world country is brought up to take these things for granted, and the man on the street in a third-world country will most possibly (being likely to be uneducated) take what is said from the text for granted. And, both of these men wrapped up with the daily business of life, many would not take into concern the ‘knowledge’ of literary heritage as imperative knowledge: little interest is there, especially when the texts themselves remain mostly indecipherable and its context, quite literally, ‘out of this world’. Again the population relies on the few middlemen in between to take care of the sifting and judging of ‘useful’ information from the ‘erroneous’ knowledge: efficiency in this medium as a mode of sharing knowledge is reduced to pearls of wisdom doled out by a few.
However, literary heritage is useful as an asset for communal identities, an efficient tool in which a group of otherwise unrelated people may find an anchor and a reason for them to stay together: histories and literary works as a point of pride among cultures and as a kind of advertisement to their greatness and shared uniqueness, which creates a sense of belonging among individuals and perhaps increases their commitment to its preservation. Given the ongoing prevalence of this in the face of globalisation, one must concede that the sharing of information from these literary texts (for every Indian child to know the Ramayana, or every Chinese able to recite the Tang poems) has been efficient to say the least in the success literary heritage enjoys as the champions of culture.
With globalisation occurring throughout the world, literary heritage has also become a way for bridging communities – each with their own sets of beliefs and words that is shared in a sort of exchange, with translations (such as, for example, the works of Honore de Balzac into English) becoming common and widely available to the masses. Societies may plunder each other’s caches of literary heritage, bringing the term into a general use for all literary heritage as independent of their belonging to their various culture that, in a global village, allows the extremely efficient sharing of knowledge across societies, within a society.
In fact, if we are to see ‘literary heritage’ in the context it has been for the whole of this essay – literary heritage both in oral tradition and written text – it is inevitable that they should be the most efficient way of sharing ideas and knowledge of the past: this was what words were invented for, after all: to communicate ideas, and to repeat ideas that have been communicated so that they might be referenced to and remembered. Moreover, literary knowledge provides links between past and present; it allows those who access enough of it to see precedence, trends, and from there predict patterns of behaviour, making it more than relevant to today’s world.
However, this ‘literary heritage’ cannot maintain this same position in the context of the modern world, and if the information involves current events: such knowledge, although a part of history (because history is made constantly), cannot be considered ‘heritage’ in the same cultural-societal context, and such information – war news, the price of lobsters in the market, inspirational stories – may tend to be of vital importance to their readers: too important to be disregarded in the light of sharing knowledge. With this void to fill the less traditional premium mediums take over: the newspaper, the television, and the internet, all of them ready and able to tackle current problems in current contexts. Although their reliability may also be disputed, their means of ‘sharing’ are efficient and the readers having no choice but to take the knowledge they offer in the context in they are read, until at least the benefit of hindsight and in the wake of later events.
These two forms of communication – literary heritage and current media – deal with different varieties of information and should be considered distinct and separate: therefore it still holds that while literary heritage does not provide the most effective way of sharing knowledge in society overall, it remains so for sharing knowledge that applies to the past, across cultures, and evolution of the society itself.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=literature
http://www.brochure-design.com/brochure-design-publishing-terms.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature
posted by the zen thing at 5:29 AM
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