Why study literature?
Besides the boredom that studying literature produces and the money saved on purchasing books for literature classes, life without literature would be quite boring. If literature was not studied, I think that people would be clueless about the different cultures and life experiences that people have been in that can be studied by reading literature. For example, if the letters written by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca were never published then we would not know what it was like for an explorer to meet and live alongside the indians that they encountered. Another example would be Elie Wiesel's Night. This literary work is important because he tells his story about his life and his experiences when he was in the comcentation camp Auschwitz. It is one thing to learn about these historic events and study them, but it is another to read someone's story first hand. A negative consequence that not reading literature is the lack of vocabulary that will be seen by the next generations. Reading literature is important because it helps expand peoples' vocabulary which may result in better communication.
A real world application that studying literature will help is critical reading, thinking, and writing. Literature can help people in the real world with this because reading literature will help people pay attention to the details that are presented in a literary piece. Literature can help with critical thinking because the reader can analyze what the writer has written and think about the piece. Lastly, literature helps critical writing because the more literature read, the more the reader becomes familiarized with sentence structure and composition which can help when writing.
Another real world application that literature can be used for is the contribution that it has to a culture. This is important because different pieces are presented depending on the culture that the author may come from. For example, literature from an author who lives in Italy by the seaside would be different than literature from an author who lives in Harlem, New York.
Overall, I think studying literature will always be important now and in the future.
