college english essay

college english essay

The Importance of Literature in College Education

1. Introduction

References in this essay to a “canon” are not intended to limit the range of characters or authors that faculty may assign, at their discretion. Rather, the “canon” as it is traditionally understood-the highly esteemed, widely known, and pervasive texts-opens the door to study of far too many writers of non-canonical works, if only to unearth the history and the reasons for their exclusion. Revision of the “canon” is especially called for in the case of very recent texts; works whose societal, literary, and/or intellectual importance can already be clearly seen and described. Literature, unlike some precise sciences, grows in the fertile soil of a culture seen as an organic, evolving whole; the “chain of memory,” or the Gramscian “National-popular,” as argued even by Cassirer’s culture-culture of America. Won Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz in his lecture, “In Praise of the Guild,” declares that liberal education, from its earliest Socratic roots, explains how “universal rules of conduct (or principles) should underpin our individual actions and underpin the functioning of our society.” Con critical thinker, therefore, uses his/her knowledge of all the connections of society, economy, history, of its rational, sub-stratum, to critique the structure and the function of these fundamental guiding principles of a new age.

Literature, though not universally considered one of the humanities, underpins many conceptions of knowledge and beauty that lie at the heart of the humanities, arts, and sciences. As American education, including higher education, struggles to shape its “core curriculum,” in the areas identified in the Boyer Report, linkages between and among disciplines within the various liberal arts and humanistic studies will undoubtedly be forged in an attempt to maintain and reconcile traditional curriculum expectations and the new revelations of the Carnegie or Boyer models. While each discipline continues to develop its own sense of self-aware history and future, the center of the academe since the days of the Greek Agora and the Roman Forum, literature will inevitably remain the mainstay of universities, both public and private. Literature, like Liberal education itself, has had a long, eventful history, and it is to that history that the present volume is dedicated.

2. Benefits of Studying Literature

Experts argue that colleges should require general education classes in literature not only for the benefits that have just been given. After all, classic works help in gaining a greater understanding of personal and community values and assist in the analysis, interpretation, and solution of social issues, all qualities that are absent in the hiring of college graduates. Students become more thoughtful and empathetic, more attentive to details, and more inquisitive. Furthermore, Bryson points out how intellectual thought promotes the development of the character it seeks to form, leading a person to live wisely and to promote the dignity and purpose of humanity, insisting on the importance of both character and the right kind of mentoring.

Studying the literature, including classical and contemporary, provides incredible benefits. First, a student’s success in both school and career grows exponentially when they spend time reading, which one study shows increases the chance of their success by ten percent. This result remains true even when controlled for other factors, only emphasizing the importance of literature. Studying literature also expands a student’s worldview. It breathes life, reflects cultural and personal realities, and encompasses human experience with its many and varied trips who call for greater understanding. As they experience words from the perspectives of diverse thinkers, more often than not, learners rethink their preconceived notions about current events and phenomena and become deep-rooted in the viewpoints of others. This further increases their chance of a fruitful, understanding, and empathetic personal and career life. Toward the personal, studying literature can be a pathway to self-discovery and reflection, which leads to greater self-awareness and empathy, as well as an intellectual and emotional growth path. Lastly, delving into more modern literature helps students understand the themes that guide our society and refine critical thinking.

3. Literary Analysis Techniques

Summarizing a chapter or text consists of reducing it to its minimum expression without losing its meaning. A first step can be highlighted blue where the ideas expressed by the author or her charismatic or orators are underlined. Then you have to realize the lack of information, which can be taken from the underlined. In short, we have to extract the ideas of the author and do them at our communication level. Understanding a text as literary language or the fact narrated in critical judgment is a trait in the human being. According to the form and content, the text will be of one or another gender, according to the same laws of the pictures, especially those that are applied to the world of the letter. Regarding formal parameters, the specialist can set a number of stanzas, length, measure, rhyme scheme, resource usage (such as metaphors) by way of examples. Regarding content, the analyst can count the myth (if this is narrated as truth), fiction, prosaic matters are dealt with. In short, we must know the language and the logic of the written gloss in order to comply with the formal and content parameters of the texts.

1.2 A Summary of the Text. Style and Thematic Analysis Technique

Before starting to apply the different literary genres that make up any written work, it will be important to describe two methodologies that are used as supporting techniques in the analysis we will carry out. We refer to research and the preparation, in general, separate work. Talking about researching is to refer to everything that, in order to complete the analysis, a previous consultation is required that the reader-salesperson must follow. This can be done from two points, depending on the knowledge, information, and previous readings you possess. If we think that the written work to be analyzed is of considerable literary quality, and if we do not have adequate information or knowledge, it is best to prepare a first approach by consulting monographs on the subject or, if our knowledge and bibliographic catalog are extensive, we must go to the first sources. We will have to examine the bases offered by literature, grammar, and lexicons where the first reading of our classics is reviewed. In short, our starting point will be the efforts and intentions of different authors to group, classify, and analyze.

4. Impact of Literature on Critical Thinking

With a heightened sensitivity and an acute realization of the world, arises the neural need, the pressing need to know and understand the world itself. For knowledge is power, and the habit of utilizing knowledge will ensure that the power is maintained. Our endeavor to stimulate the minds of the fledglings in our classrooms, in the exercise of numerous short and critical essays, in discussions, debates and argumentations, finds a perfect training ground in the hermeneutics of literature. It is not so much the various shades, the diverse flavors and color schemes that delight, in only a works of art. Art represents the latent and veiled truth that content symbolizes. Just like in an x-ray it is not the shadow pattern that fascinates, but the skeletal structure that determines the pattern, so also in fiction, poetry or drama, it is not the plot nor the theme that captives as – it is the depth, the dimension, the margin, the texture that Artist employs to distill that meaning ad truth, that impact on us – that makes us grow in emotional and intellectual stature and maximize our humanity which would be otherwise in denial.

Over and above this, literature forces us to intervene continually in the flow of meaning – a relationship which, though difficult, is the elementary act of learning resolutely opposed to the risk of a routine fanatical representation of reality. This is why works of art are in the highest degree philosophical truth. Let us begin with a few questions that are crucial to the evaluation of educational theories: What is thinking? What should education be aiming at if it were interested in intellectual development? The easy access to the World of Meaning” requires that “The Word Mean The Ultimate Sensation”.

5. Conclusion

At its most basic level, literature is of utmost value to our education because of its contribution to our literacy. On a secondary level, literature can, even with simple stories and simple children, build and preserve readers. At a third level, literature, with its complexities that provoke the intellect, develops an understanding of fine and broad analysis, and an ease of verbalization. Increasing on the subject’s implied, a fourth dressed literature will develop an appreciation and fluency if an appreciation and Vietnam and understanding of others. Literate, scribing the impact of the novel on the college campus long ago, wrote, “New books astonish us, year after year-constantly, since the dawn if men, the same prejudices and the same errors are deplored; pernicious books are everywhere and lead astray those who read them. The universal diffusion of reason and knowledge have not yet softened either the heart or its cunning, and the human species has not begun to repay its irrevocable debt.” We live in a time when literature is being devalued in a dramatic way and it is high tide that we understand how vital it is to the education of our people, how stimulating, how informative, how entertaining and how wonderful it is.

Conclusion. The critical reading of an exceptional novel is a way to open the mind, to engage in original thinking. It is a chase, a familiarization with a satisfying form of aesthetic beauty. The satisfaction will open the reader to the business of creative consequence which is both part of being and a potential in us all. This special training offered by the novel is not for everyone, of course, nor is it ever intended to be. Yet today, in the colleges, the preoccupations are often on behalf of students who will never read literature again.