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What Is Literature?: Truth and Beauty
What Is Literature?: Truth and Beauty
WHAT IS LITERATURE?
The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups: the sciences and the arts. The sciences
include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting,
modeling, needlework, drama, music, literature.
Why are sciences and arts important? With sciences the answer is obvious: the achievements are a sort of by-
product; the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. Task is simply stated: to
be curious, to keep on asking the question “Why?” and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found.
ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
The artist finds a means of setting down our emotions; and, as it were, helps us to separate those emotions
from ourselves. Any strong emotion has to be relieved. Emotion has to be expressed.
ARTISTIC METHODS
The student of literature must always maintain a live interest also in music and painting, sculpture,
architecture, film and theatre. All the arts try to perform the same sort of task, differing only in their methods.
Methods are dictated by the sort of material used. There are spatial materials (paint, stone and clay) and there
are temporal materials (words, sounds, dance-steps, stage movements)
Music and literature have a great deal in common: they both use the temporal material of sounds. Music uses
meaningless sounds as raw material; literature uses those meaningful sounds we call words.
USE OF WORDS
Words themselves can be viewed in two different ways: the meaning that a word has in the dictionary (what is
called lexical meaning or the denotation) and the associations that the word has gained through constant use
(the connotation of the word). Connotation appeal to the feelings, denotations to the brain.
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The writer of literature is much more concerned with connotations, the ways in which he can make his words
move or excite you, the ways in which he can suggest colour or movement or character. The writer of literature
differs from the scientist or lawyer in not restricting his words. The word can carry two meanings; can suggest
two different things at the same time. It is not only the dictionary meaning that counts – it sound, suggestion of
other meanings, other words, as well as those clusters of harmonics we call connotations.
Literature may be defined as words working hard; literature is the exploitation of words.
LITERARY FORMS
Literature has different branches, and some branches do more exploiting of words than others. Poetry relies
most on the power of words, on their manifold suggestiveness, and in a sense you may say that poetry is the
most literary of all branches of literature; the most literary because it makes the greatest use of the raw
material of literature, which are words. There are other branches of literature and “near-literature”: for
example, the essay.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Language means a system of sounds made by the vocal organs of a particular group of people, possessing
meaning for that group of people, and existing continuously for a given period of history. English has been
spoken continuously in England for over fifteen hundred years, but the English spoken in 1000 A.D is a
language that the Englishman of today cannot understand. The “historical phases” of a language and we use the
terms “Old English” and “Modern English”.
DIALECTS
“English” means all the different kinds of English spoken from the very moment the first speakers of the
language settled in England up to the present day. But it also means all the varying kinds of English spoken in
different places, at any given moment in time. Today in England itself a local dialect of English can be heard in
Lancashire, another in Kent, and so on. But they all have a sound claim to be regarded as “true English”, though
we find it convenient to call them English dialects. The dialect chosen is usually the one which is spoken in the
capital city, in the royal court or in the universities. The English dialect which has established itself as the most
important is that now known as Standard English, historically speaking a mixture of the old East Midland
dialect and the old Kentish dialect. In the Middle phase all the dialects of England seemed to be as good as each
other and all of them had literatures. Today English literature contains works in the many English dialects of
America, and even in the dialect of the West Indian Negro.
English literature, then, is vast, extending long in time and wide in space.