humanities homework help

humanities homework help

Exploring the Impact of Literature on Society: A Multidisciplinary Approach

1. Introduction to the Role of Literature in Shaping Societal Values

Why literature? Think for a moment past contemporary society, past even modern civilization, young as it is. Imagine a mediated society some five or ten thousand years before today, peopled by Homo sapiens, without industry but hardly troglodytic. What do we have of them? Certainly no great technological advances that distinguish people from animals, making land lucrative and worth squabbling; certainly no great world religions involving standardized formulas and claims to unique truth. Only shared stories separate a civilization from animal clans. Stories articulate the rules of sharing, the rhythm of work, the art of wit and wisdom, the mood of play; playing together fixes the fragile link between any one member and the larger collective. Throughout history, the creation of literature – of storytelling, of epic poetry, of drama – has been dedicated to this active creation of values embedded in a culture’s society. Literature handles values in the everyday ways of art. Even the novel that went through the modern period of art for art’s sake is definitively didactic; it illustrates.

Imagine a world bereft of the Bible, the Quran, the Mahabharata, or the Torah; a world without myths from every corner of the earth – no Norse or Greek myths, no Indian epics, no stories of Anansi or Coyote. What is more, what if there were no Hamlet, no A Tale of Two Cities, no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? A society without literature – the world above – seems impossible to fathom, but it has happened before and it can happen again. Literature is the window into a society’s individual and collective mind, the imaginations, which in turn dictate that society’s broader beliefs, philosophy, culture, customs, and values. It is thus the task of this volume to consider the theory and criticism of literature as it intersects with other disciplines to better understand values.

2. Literature as a Reflection of Cultural and Historical Contexts

Regardless of the literature specially dealt with in this area, one may notice a close relationship between historical events and the articulation of the different values and cultures of society as a whole. In many ways, literature is a reflection of the values and attitudes of a society. Thus, the texts used in the area of literature can be seen as the expression of these values and attitudes or indeed conversely as an attempt to confront or challenge these values and attitudes. One of the functions of an English department is, therefore, to make explicit the relationship between the language and culture that constitute the curriculum on the one hand, and the textual materials used on the other. Literature is a valuable primary source for critics and literary historians; this is partly due to its public role as a mode of self-expression and communication and its contribution to the value system within its society. It contrasts with other written work that is primarily a product of its time and place such as official documents, personal records, business writing and news writing.

Literature may be understood as a showcase not only of the author’s understanding of reality, but also a reflection of the cultural and historical contexts that shape their thoughts. Therefore, given this multidisciplinary approach, literature analysis cannot restrict itself to a purely formal reading of the text, leaving aside the historical context, among other factors. This holistic reading of literary works is fundamental if we really want to understand the peculiarities of an author and their works and, therefore, to prompt a greater interest in literature among readers.

3. The Influence of Literature on Social Change and Activism

Literature is also used as a protest tool to describe and criticize oppressive structures, allowing people to see their realities in print. Saul Bellow’s Debt to Society discusses the relationship between literature and social justice. It aided in the creation of the 1960s-era civil rights movement in Algeria, as well as the African anti-colonialist movement, which offers an instance of the changes literature has triggered. As a result of the militant actions advocated in the works of liberalism in Algeria, the North African nation was finally “liberated,” and this will also be the result of an improved political and social orientation proposed by the different writers in Hong Kong. Art and literature can motivate and educate the public, encourage civil society to examine the current system, and give a voice to people willing to listen. Just like literature, art and art making have transformative potential and may offer us a glimpse into the present and the future. Art can shock and inspire us to act, as many artists have shown since the turbulent year 1968. Making art in the streets can foster community. A public art campaign, for example, can increase tourism, as well as visiting local and overseas visitors.

For centuries, literature has been a vehicle for expressing deep human sentiments, capturing societal movements, and affecting change. In the past, conscious efforts were made to explore the impact of literature on different strata of society and to address literature’s abilities to facilitate social change using a multidisciplinary approach. Literature, through novels, political tracts, and other genres, has been used to sensitize people to the realities and grievances of others and to call for social change and reform. Many literary pieces, such as works by writers Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Gellhorn, and Calvino, have been used to explore the relationship between literature and activism. Literature written at various points in history portrays people who took to the streets to effect social change at the time, such as novels in Egypt, the works of Nabokov, Dickens, Gide, Stowe, and dozens of others, Philippines, Russia, and Hong Kong. Daily mass protests in various parts of the world, galvanized in part by the influence of literature and art, can attest to the great tradition bestowed upon us of art that triggers the activist within ourselves.

4. Analyzing the Representation of Gender, Race, and Class in Literature

When we read representations in literature, we can glean information about societies that we may not otherwise have access to. In this detail-oriented approach, we glimpse episodes of life, or, more appropriately, episodes of literature, in which such groups make themselves known as belonging to more than one category. Indeed, because nature is to a prodigious degree parallel/parapetal/skin to the work of culture, we can also glean information about the cultural movements of specific writers and the eras they wrote in ways that cannot usually happen with data collected through sociological or anthropological work. Therefore, reading and interpreting literature asking to be read “realistically” is also a style of sociologic or anthropologic fieldwork, from an imagined community of the past moving out.

In literary theory and conversations about representations, gender, race, and class have frequently been divided in the analysis; sometimes, two of these forms will be considered alongside one another and the third will be relegated to a postscript-like conclusion. However, works of literature frequently invite, and at times, demand, focus on reading for all three axes at once. In our two examples, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we can see examples of the various ways that literary texts might problematize conventional societal constructs of gender, race, and class, both seeking to represent realities as authors involved in cultural conversation, sticking to some rules of recognizability, and asking to be read as fiction.

5. Conclusion: The Ongoing Relevance of Humanities in a Changing World

Over the series of contributions, the aims of this introduction – both in terms of identifying the convergences and divergences between the ideas and conclusions arising from different disciplinary domains and, more pragmatically, in terms of evaluating what type of knowledge can be produced through an open and flexible exchange across disciplinary boundaries. A number of common threads have emerged from this set of papers that signal an ongoing relevance to the field of literature in approaching today’s society and its different ways of relating to film and literature. These are: a) the insistence on the ongoing ‘renaissance’ of the literary in the academic world – across schools of thought, approaches, and disciplines; b) the centrality of the questions of ‘aesthetization’ and of the canon, with the political implications of these angles being widely investigated; c) a number of significant extraspecialist contributions who reinvest, through the prism of the humanities, the question of literature’s and of the literary’s impact come from the margins of the specialist body in a multi-method approach.

In a world that aims to transform itself at an unstoppable pace, restructuring the humanities may seem equally inevitable. In the intersection, I have chosen as a testament to the collaborative product of literary criticism and linguistics to the study of the interface between literature and society as a meaning-oriented usage, language is often part of ideology, official or not, and therefore reflects social and individual customs, beliefs, and propensities. In addition to the ideological structure of speech, literature often reflects the social order, hierarchies, as well as various typologies belonging to different domains of social human life.