what is a literature essay

what is a literature essay

Understanding Literature Essays

1. Introduction

The necessity to concentrate deeply on the message is the same in both art and Literature. Our response to Literature will be has to concentrated. Writers make the understanding of the message possible to us by the setting of the themes, characters and their interaction, and the revelation of the major events. Lack of communication function is responsible for misunderstanding the theme depicted by the writer. Like any writer, in literature writers create picturesque representation in both their themes of the work and also in their essays which makes our understanding of a particular theme representational.

Some readers approach one essay while going through another essay. Some dedicate a whole day to an essay. And yet some cover essays immediately after reading the extracts. No matter how the reader covers the essays, it is important that the reader prepares for the essay lessons with some guidelines. It is for this purpose that this Unit is written. Literature is a medium of communication for those writers whose feelings have to be imparted to the readers. Every piece of literature is a message, a theme which has been exposed to the readers in the form of the story which the writer has devised. Understanding that message immediately, as one reads the novel or short stories might not be possible all the time. Because, as with any work of art, literature creates its own world in the reader’s mind and that world also extends much beyond the living world itself. Current reality so strongly affects us that our minds are preoccupied with our problems of daily living. Consequently, the literary atmosphere may not have its full impact on us.

2. Analyzing Literature

What happens is that, since that great moment in literature, human beings have become addicted to storytelling. We read a lot, we love to read and be told. It is not that we need a moral to the story, but rather that we must learn to be taught to think differently, to surprise us with other people’s lives and deeds. A good novel surprises us, it makes us make decisions that were unexpected; speeches that open alternative paths in our thinking. We need to read, it is a natural need and we must not do it in order to learn but in order to think. Both in writing and in love, as the teacher said, there is no need to hurry. A novel has its rhythm that demands time, patience, understanding. And that self-imposed delay is what always results in a great reward – internal happiness.

We often misunderstand the concept of literature. Literature, and narration, in particular, are powerful tools and in today’s society, with the participation in social networks, we tend to forget this. Great novels like Don Quixote, Moby Dick or Madame Bovary have great lessons and teachings behind them. It is true that we live in a world saturated with information, where the tyranny of the quick and the merely public without meaning seem to be imposed. However, can we live without good stories? With books, man has represented his world, his environments, his fears, in short, his life. All our knowledge of ancient civilizations has been through their stories, through their way of narrating their myths and heroes. Thanks to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, we know what the ancient Mediterranean world was like.

What literature teaches us

3. Crafting a Thesis

So, you want to avoid rewriting the rest of your essay at any and all costs. We use revisions to assist us in this process. Given that early work often gestates into fully-formed, brilliant papers, your best bet may be to use class discussion to reconceive a stronger thesis. The first step in this process should be a dissection of your working thesis; identify how the reader might understand your statement and begin to return to careful examination of the prompt to determine how a reader likely will. Are there viable alternatives to that assumption of understanding that should be addressed? Is there a way to further refine “what the text means” in the context of the prompt demands? Is your paper poised to challenge another interpretation? A great way to begin to narrow and focus where you’re going is reframe the prompt in one of three ways. First, starts to run revisions on what you understand the text to mean by the time you arrive at your thesis. The result will be a stronger thesis or an example of a technically marvelous, yet misplaced thesis. Consider the contrast you could provide between the two, or two other supporting or challenging points to one another.

One of the things writers struggle with to a greater extent than almost any other aspect of their work is thesis crafting. Crafting a thesis is not particularly hard, but doing so perfectly every time is hard, in part because we often don’t take the time to get it just right. The assignments in this class are typically short, so I expect and require that a thesis statement in your papers be located within the first paragraph (or so) of your work. The thesis statement should be general and, to some extent, preliminary, cementing the direction in which your work will travel. Still, a thesis proposed in your first paragraph of each paper sometimes won’t be perfect.

4. Writing the Essay

Remember that you can and should also begin with your ideas and fill them out with the sophisticated and challenging criticisms of others, and you may lead your reader to your own synthesis by the end; but the critics come first. Connect to “classic” criticisms. If you are trying to make a counterintuitive argument, you are risking coming across as esoteric or recondite, an idiot who cannot engage with the classic criticisms others have assembled. If you are aiming for successful reader response to your sophisticated thesis, always look to the classics of literary criticism for support or challenge. You should be familiar with what they have said about each other, but you may choose to write a paper that resists the schools of the Greek army coming from all sides to engage the Spartans or Persians in a pincer movement and create a multi-layered and nuanced understanding, while at the same time following up on the prospects one or two successors have offered.

This is not to say that your ideas are not original and intriguing, but that your education is richer when you are engaged with the ideas of others. On the other hand, you should strike an appropriate balance in your papers: 40 percent quotation – 60 percent response is a suggested, but not an ironclad rule. Successful response papers usually engage with a variety of sources, including the pointed or implicit dialogue you carry on with your reading partners in class discussions.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, we can discuss how the theories that approach literature not only encompass the philosophical-literary field but also encompass social matters, reinforcing the inevitable dialogue with historical and social theories. As we go back to studies about textual analysis, figurative textuality becomes a remarkable point. In this way, all these theories can be used in a complementary way, some more, others less, some not at all, it depends on the reader’s interest and the type of reflection he wants to do on the work or on literature as a whole. The think tank that is literature is interdisciplinary and comprehensive, and literature likens innumerable situations of individual and collective life, not only the most general.

Finally, it is good for the reader to be aware that there are a hundred literary theories and most of them are good as a starting point unless they are philosophical theories or literary theories. They are necessary because literature touches on the questions of life and it is usual for the reader with feelings to analyze the meaning of life, happiness, frustration, death, love, pleasure, joy, among other occurrences of life, and this effort seems to be positive, because the questions are philosophical and the answers can never be found. As a result, several theories emerge in the same field of existence. Literature uses techniques (poetry of the early ages) to express these questions. This symbolic world is attributed to primitive people of the pre-literate era, and so our attention focuses rigorously on special things like writing and types of writing. It is not easy to describe literature.