Universitario

Laura Andrino
Lengua y Cultura IV

9 de Abril de 2012.-




“LITERATURE”“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment orawkwardness.”
Helen Keller




Literature is not a historical library of great books, it is a phenomenon produced by writers in their ownage and, as such, it usually requires interpretation.
It is well known that we could learn through literature about cultures, about how others lived – the Greeks, the Romans, the men in the MiddleAges, our own contemporaries: how they judged one another, what they considered good manners, how they fell in love, what their family life was like, how they structured their society, what were theirmeals, how they grew up and took their place in the world of adults.



Literature also teaches us more about psychology, perhaps more than psycologists can. Can anyone think that there is moreunderstanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud´s studies than from Shakespeare´s capacity for embodying feelings in his characters?
The inner life – and its relation to the outer appearance,from which it is often very different, is literature´s special subject, with its interweaving of motives, impulses, appetites, ideals and ambitions.
Literature movilizes all our faculties ofknowledge at once, not just our ability to analyze the outer world but our introspection and intuition, as well. We can understand what is going on in the hearts of the others because we know what stirs ourown hearts and what could stir them.
When a writer imagines his characters´inner drama, his description rings true to us because we have felt similar impulses or imagined analogous situations....