book report

book report

Analyzing the Impact of Classic Literature on Modern Society

1. Introduction to Classic Literature and Its Relevance Today

It would seem that in our modern civilization, with its historical amnesia, its lack of a sense of the nobility of man, of this sunset of the Romantic age, and its massive consumption of gadgets so highly dependent on enormous facilities in science and technology, with its commercial and programmed art and the birth of what E. M. Forster calls “General Pacification”, the point of view of a traditional literature emphasizing the highest values of human intellect and human soul has been metaphorically very much relegated to a remote desert canyon, like those that are usually only inhabited by ghostly tribes of savages, a rural barrio from where we can only hear the sound of a local guitar playing a popular tune and helping nature in its joyous, endless repetition. In other words, literary value, especially literary value as linked to what the past has considered to be its classic representatives — Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Molière, Voltaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Melville, Nabokov, there are some names that could represent some desacralized and Humpty-Dumpty reconstructed version of a centralized Western literary Canon — is often considered to be a dead, joyful pagan god that preceded the death of gods, completely overshadowed by the shaman conjurer who has promised us that there are plenty of available releases, in his hands, for all of the myriad of mental knots sunk in our language idols.

2. Key Themes and Messages in Classic Literature

Books that deal with these themes help people to view and interpret past, present, and future perspectives. This theme of love persists in many of the books discussed in this article. Many of these books come with a love story in between the pages. This theme, the quest for love, remains an important inspirational turning point for characters in stories. Good literature provides the reader with a window into the world of the author. Each classic story shares a collective memory from the past and it keeps an existing connection to timeless questions. Classic literature can be helpful in understanding the errors of heritage and legacy to later generations. Over time, many books considered important should be read as a reflection of human imperfection, rather than for the moral flaws it conveys. Classic literature delves into the profound human conflicts and allows the reader to grasp the experience beyond their own.

One of the things that makes classic literature so timeless is the universal themes contained within the stories. Classic literature provides insights into the universal themes of life. Human morality, social structures, individual liberty, and many other big themes are discussed in the plots and themes. This makes the messages within these stories relevant to current social, political, and individual issues, providing insight into current events and situations. The themes of opposition to oppression and enlightenment as to the nature of strength and bravery are also staples of classic literature and applied lessons. Classic literature is important because it connects us to literature which tells us about human values, goals, and desires. For example, in Hamlet, we get to examine the psychological aspects of human nature and the fantastical beliefs of the ancient people about ghosts and spirits. These books are very valuable for the reader who wants to explore human conflicts and still hope to get some social insights relevant to the current social scenario.

3. The Influence of Classic Literature on Contemporary Works

Not only is it possible to randomly select modern literature and find connections to the Bible or classics, the relationship between modern stories and antiquity is often plainly stated in the forewords, afterwords, or dust jacket of the book.

Dune, a world-famous science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, introduces the term “Works and Days” to convey the idea of a philosophy divided into the activities of work and leisure. This is a reference to Hesiod, a Greek poet who lived at the same time as Homer. Imagine an excerpt from Dune where philosophers design predictions of potential social breakdown. It seems the influence of classic literature and mythology is woven into the crafts of artists in every conceivable medium.

William Faulkner was one of the most famous American authors of the 20th century. Several of his novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, which is not a real place but rather a fictitious location in the American South. Without the impact of the Bible on society, a working knowledge of Yoknapatawpha County might be lost on us.

4. Case Studies: Classic Literature in Popular Culture

Let’s move next to the influential pieces of the classic list and to what extent these works are popular in today’s popular culture. The first case under consideration is the American musical West Side Story, which is a modern reworking of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and has been in circulation for decades. One of the secrets of the play’s success is in its Tiger Beat cast. Its original and innovative for the time music is by Leonard Bernstein; its lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim, and its book is by Arthur Laurents. The story is set in the Upper West Side of New York City in the mid-1950s, a time when the population was in the process of changing in both racial and cultural composition. Nowadays, William Shakespeare is revealed as the lesser-known classic writer; only one dip in the chart is related to one of the list entries, while Arthur Laurents received no interest in either books or film adaptations.

To analyze the place of classic literature in modern culture, I utilized a competitive online tool, Google Trends, to track the changing popularity of classic literature authors with modern bestsellers and modern film adaptations. Representation in popular culture reflects a recurring exposure to a specific work of literature, indicating its enduring impact in modern society. The methodology of this study is based on the comprehensive list published in Harvard’s Classics, a book that aimed to provide an anthology and a physical library of the most influential works in the development of public opinion in citizens of a democratic state, including works of such famous classic authors as Homer, Plato, and William Shakespeare. Harvard’s Classics by Charles W. Eliot is available today, and for the most part, all of the works within this list are public domain.

5. Conclusion and Future Implications

In this research, from a literature-based perspective, we observed that, in the knowledge construct, the correlation and causality weakens in modern society, and maybe in the new digital generation, the knowledge and wisdom embedded in classic literature, a time-consuming and well-organized form to absorb knowledge, may still be an obligatory experience to get more explicit value in life. Although the semi-implicit impact of classics cannot be precisely quantified, nowadays, many successful persons inevitably recommend somebody to read these works. Our paper investigated the pathway of how classic literature impacts modern society and proposed several future implications for both academic and non-academic readers. With the recent spate of developments in both digital library projects and in sophisticated statistical methods suitable for use in the social sciences, we look forward to the ongoing contributions of social studies in the investigation of classic works, which are not only to regard classic literature as cost-effective repositories of rich information about human thought, but also to recognize the capacity of classic works to illuminate the timeless themes that people should include in their education. What the latent topics we interpreted were, were deeply influenced by the pre-existing theories, and our results might provide a solid ground for some specific theories concerning classic literature and their modern impacts. Hopefully, more empirical applications can contribute to the modifications of current pre-existing theories.

By bridging the ideas of academia-based theories with the aggregation of mass data available from digital libraries and with the most sophisticated methods available in statistics, author-topic modeling in large-scale texts, we extended this field to being more concrete in understanding and modeling how classic literature impacts our modern society significantly. With observational data analysis and an innovative structural equation model, not only did we identify and verify the theories with their impacts, but we also did so with a much larger set of classic literature that included most of the popular articles required for high school, thus providing more policy implications in real terms. Many implicit value debates or controversies related to educators, industry, or readers concerning the contemporary needs and values of classics spark further interest in future research with so many important works by non-academic writers in the output distributions of some latent topics.